Eighteen big hospitals in northeastern China have been using fake human albumin, or plasma protein, to treat patients, state television reported in the latest food and medicine scandal to hit the country.
In regular checks made by the food and drug administration in Jilin province, seven of 36 batches of the albumin, fed into the bloodstream by drip, contained zero protein.
"There was no protein component," Xu Fei, deputy chief of Jilin food and drug inspection department, told China Central Television. "It will not have the benefit it should have. We can say it is an out-and-out fake product."
Experts said that use of the fake drip could put lives at risk for those already seriously ill.
Eighteen hospitals and 39 drug trading companies were found to be using the fake human albumin, which led to huge profits because of its low production cost.
The State Food and Drug Administration said the Jilin probe was part of a wider, national crackdown on fake human albumin, a concentrate of plasma proteins used to treat shock from blood loss, burns and low protein levels in the body.
"After several months of hard work, the project to bring order to the human albumin (market) has now achieved results," it said in a statement on its Web site (www.sda.gov.cn).
"Jilin, Shanxi, Qinghai, Hubei, Shandong, Liaoning, Chongqing and Xinjiang have investigated a series of fake albumin cases, and have effectively cleaned up the market," the statement added, referring to the parts of China where the probe focused on.
It did not say if anyone had died or fallen ill from using the fake products, and provided details of the crackdown only for Jilin.
There, it said, an underground network selling the fake plasma had been smashed.
Some of the hospitals called by Reuters were not immediately available for comment.
Billions of dollars worth of counterfeit and substandard goods, from fake liquor and medicines to luxury handbags, are produced every year in China.
In the most recent scandal, U.S. consumers were alarmed by a spate of pet deaths blamed on tainted wheat gluten and rice protein exported from China, as well as reports of toxins and disease in other Chinese exports.
A Chinese-made medicine ingredient also killed at least 100 people in Panama, according to a report in the New York Times.
In one of the most highly publicized scandals, China revealed in 2004 that at least 13 babies had died from malnutrition in the eastern province of Anhui after being fed fake baby formula.
Nearly 200,000 people die each year in China from improper use of legitimate drugs, according to Jin Shiming, a committee member of the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technological Association.
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