The China Charity Federation, the mainland's second-largest NGO, has denied a microblog's accusation that it sold expensive donated drugs to leukaemia and gastrointestinal cancer patients.
The charity said it had strict regulations in the application and circulation of the drug Glivec, donated by pharmaceutical giant Novartis and usually sold for about 25,000 yuan (HK$30,500) a box on the mainland, to prevent those who received supplies from trading them, The Beijing News reported yesterday.
The federation said it did not sell the medicine, and that the practice was that patients who had already bought three months' supply of Glivec would receive another nine months' supply free of charge, using the donated drug. This complied with the charity's 'bottom line' in all donated drug projects, which was that patients had to bear no more than a quarter of total drug costs, with the federation taking care of the rest.
It said that in a small number of regions, patients could buy six months' worth of Glivec and be reimbursed by their medical insurance. In such cases the charity provided six months worth of the drug,
Novartis introduced the drug donation programme to the mainland in 2003, and by the end of last month, 16,868 patients had benefited from it.
The microblog posting on Tuesday that accused the charity of selling the drug spread rapidly and caused a public outcry.