In the dusty confines of workshops like this, bogus pharmaceuticals are made with filthy equipment and a lethal combination of ingredients. The end product can kill when wrongly used in the treatment of illness

ON a cold night in February, 75-year-old Ma Luanming entered Yueya Lake Hospital in suburban Nanjing suffering from facial pains.

Doctors at the hospital, who claim to specialise in treating Tic Douloureux, a neurological disease that tortures its victims with severe stabbing jolts to the cheek and neck, injected Mr Ma with a domestically made anti-convulsant. Over the next several hours, they gave him two shots, containing a total of four milligrams of the drug. That should have blunted the pain but didn't. Although agonising, Tic Douloureux is rarely life threatening. So when Mr Ma woke the following morning in a worsened state, his daughter sensed something was wrong. A few hours later, he was dead.

At first, Mr Ma's daughter suspected the doctors had improperly treated her father, and they might have. But after she shipped some of the anti-convulsant they used to Xian Biochemical Pharmaceutical, the manufacturer listed on the package, she discovered something more sinister at work.

The drug-maker found the medicine to be counterfeit and made from a combination of ingredients company scientists could not even identify, according to an account of Mr Ma's death that appeared in the popular and hard-hitting weekly newspaper Southern Weekend.

This case, although extreme, is not unusual. Nor is it surprising that in a country where soap, razor blades, tobacco, vehicle parts, and anything else with a market share and profit margin is subject to counterfeiting, pharmaceuticals are being faked.

Just how much is anybody's guess. The mainland's drug market is believed to be worth about US$40 billion (about HK$312 billion) a year, with Western-style pharmaceuticals accounting for about US$6.5 billion.