There’s more on that case of unethical human experimentation gone badly wrong at a hospital in Shanghai I blogged about yesterday. It’s looking like the hospital is in some serious trouble, and the German company that seemed to be taking advantage of China’s more [ahem] relaxed regulations and enforcement should be in serious trouble too. Speaking of which, are these their websites? Those are the first two google results for “berlin heart AG”, but at the base of those pages the company is called BerlinHeart GmbH. The contents of their newsletters (I really don’t want to download the PDFs, real journalists can do the real investigation) makes no mention of China, but then again, their newsletters seem to come out rather irregularly. I suppose if I downloaded some of the PDFs from back in 2004 I might, perhaps, find some mention of their work in Shanghai at the time this kid died, but like I said, real journalists can do the real investigation.
Huh. In the overview of their “For Patients” section, we have this:
“INCOR®� describes our implantable left ventricular assist device and its function. INCOR® is preferably applied for adult patients, whose clinical condition decreases slowly but continuously.
(my emphasis added)
Now, neither of the china.org.cn articles I’ve seen actually mentioned what device, exactly, was implanted in this child, but I find it hard to accept that a device “preferably applied for adult patients” would be suitable for a 13 year old.
Well, I’m trying to figure out how I’d find any of the original Chinese articles or more Chinese reporting on this, I suspect those reports may have a little more detail to them.
Nah, I’m giving up for now. Life in this soup last night’s CCTV 1 weather forecast rather creatively called “fog” is draining me of my energy. But I’ll be interested to see if any more articles come out about this. And if anyone has any ideas of how to find any of the Chinese articles on this, leave a comment. I tried, but to no avail.
