Chinese Legislators Condemn False Medical Ads

Chinese lawmakers attending the current 17th meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) expressed that false or exaggerated medicine commercials should be checked by law.

They expressed the above opinion when examining the draft of the revised Drug Administration Law.

Some of them complained that in many commercials, drugs are like magic products with great medical power.

The participants agreed that false advertisements mislead patients and bring harm to them, physically and psychologically. False commercials must be stopped through laws, they held.

Many pharmaceutical manufacturers are investing more and more money in advertisement than in the development of new products, according to lawmakers.

Chen Junliang, a member of the NPC Standing Committee, proposed that the commercials must make it clear what is being advertised are medicine or health products. The law must force these ads to declare the ingredients, effects, ways of taking them, possible side effects, taboos and other matters that should be noted.

A kind of medicine that did not declare its side effects has caused many children to lose their hearing, he noted.

According to the latest reports, 2.5 million Chinese took wrong drugs, annually, due to false advertisements.

In her speech, Chen Suzhi, another NPC Standing Committee member, denounced the false advertisements using film stars. The actors should be on their guard when endorsing medical products in advertisements, she said.

Some other speakers suggest that greater awareness about how to recognize false or true commercials be made among the public.

The advertisement Industry has developed rapidly in China in recent years. In the first half of this year, the country achieved 28.2 billion in the sales of advertisements, up 12.3 percent over the same period last year.

China adopted the Drug Administration Law in 1985 and enacted the Methods on the Examination of Medical Advertisement. Last July, the government began revising the administration law.



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