Jiangmen parents sue over encephalitis vaccine

The parents of a 12-year-old boy from Guangdong who has been in a coma for six months after getting vaccinated for Japanese encephalitis vaccine at a local health center say they are being prevented by the authorities from travelling to Hong Kong seek medical help.

The family, surnamed Yu, live in Jiangmen city, where several other children have reportedly suffered health problems after being vaccinated. The parents have formed a group and filed official complaints with local governments and even in Beijing, but to no avail. They are also in the process of filing civil lawsuits for compensation.

“We are being kept down by the authorities, who are preventing us from leaving the country,” the boy’s father Mr. Yu told RFA’s Cantonese service.

“We wanted to go to Hong Kong to seek medical treatment and to hold a news conference with others in the same situation. But now we can’t. They have already cancelled my passport and the police have warned me not to tell the truth to the overseas media,” he said.

The relatives, surnamed Leung, of a six year-old girl also given the vaccine said her condition had improved greatly after she received top-class medical attention at an army hospital.

An official who answered the phone at the Jiangmen municipal centre for disease control said it wouldn’t be appropriate to give out further details to the media now that the civil lawsuit had already been filed on the issue.

China is facing a shortage of human albumin, or plasma protein, but the quality of blood products is guaranteed, the government said on Tuesday.

Authorities have launched a crackdown on producers of fake and shoddy vaccines as well as on underground blood collection centres as it tries to tackle a growing number of health scandals involving substandard products.

More background from Reuters.

Listen to the report in Cantonese

Image: The distribution of Japanese encephalitis, 1970-1998. From U.S. CDC