(Reuters Health) - (Reuters Health) - Faulty blood-testing kits for HIV and hepatitis may have been fraudulently sold to government clinics across India, possibly resulting in people receiving transfusions of infected blood, officials said on Thursday.
The government is seizing kits across the country and has ordered a probe into the possible fraud after two brothers appeared in a Kolkata court on Monday accused of selling hundreds of thousands of blood-testing kits long past their expiry date.
Govind and Ghansyam Sharma, whose company Monozyme India has several contracts to supply the kits to the government, deny charges of malpractice and forgery.
Both are still in police custody after being denied bail.
"The Kolkata police findings have a strong nationwide connection and we have ordered seizures of kits from every other state," said P K Hota, who retired on Wednesday as India's health secretary.
"We will... find out how many people have been infected by HIV or hepatitis and rectify the mistakes," he added.
The news follows a report published by Britain's Royal Society of Medicine which said that India dangerously underestimated the number of its estimated 5.7 million HIV-infected people who caught the virus through reused needles in hospitals and similar hygiene lapses.
The U.S. researchers, writing in the society's International Journal of STD (sexually transmitted disease) and AIDS, said India is placing too much emphasis on preventing the sexual transmission of the virus.
India says more than 80 percent of HIV-infected people caught the virus while having sex, much of the time with prostitutes. The report says these figures are inflated and are blinding India to preventing other routes of transmission.
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