By Kim Rahn
Capsuled drugs made of dead fetuses in China have been smuggled into Korea and sold as tonics, a television program reported Saturday.
SBS’s investigative program “We Want to Know” uncovered that some hospitals in China were selling dead fetuses along with placentas to illegal drugmakers.
The program has caused a huge stir, with many netizens and bloggers demanding a thorough investigation into the allegations that the capsules are being sold here.
The investigative journal also aired details of the production process. The producer and staff from the show disguised themselves as dealers and visited a ramshackle house in China where a woman showed them frozen dead fetuses in a freezer for sale.
Those drugmakers dried the fetuses using microwaves made for to prepare drug materials. “They dried the fetuses, ground them and made easy-to-swallow capsules just as if they were making Oriental herbal medicines. The process was taking place at a house in very unhygienic conditions,” the program reported.
Some of the drugs there were made from six-month-old fetuses and even up to eight-month-old ones were available, the drugmakers said.
Such drugs are smuggled into Korea by the Korean-Chinese. As a tonic, 100 capsules are sold at 40,000 won in China but are sold for much higher at hundreds of thousands of won here, according to the program.
An examination by the National Forensic Service of one of the capsules showed that the DNA detected from the powder in the capsule was that of a human male.