China Probes Baidu Over False Medical Ads After Student Dies

hackingbear writes: China's Internet regulator said on Monday it will send a team to investigate Baidu Inc over the death of a university student who used the Chinese search engine to look for treatment for his rare cancer, and to find an experimental treatment offered by the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps, which eventually proved ineffective. Before dying, Wei accused Baidu online of promoting false medical information, as well as the hospital for misleading advertising in claiming a high success rate for the treatment, state radio said. The post attracted a large public outcry. Baidu says around one quarter of its revenues come from medical and health-care advertisers.

Re: And republicans want to censor...

[John Smith]

It's okay to censor actually malicious information. It's called "false advertising" or "malware".

Obvious response

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use the internet to look for medical treatments. Go to the doctor if you want treatment.

Re:Obvious response

[misosoup7]

Which doctor? How do you know the doctor you go to will be a specialist for the treatment that you need? You should look up online to see what treatment options are available and which doctors/hospitals/clinics specializes in what forms of cancer. The case in here is that the student had stage iv synovial sarcoma. And chemo and radiation didn't work. That's pretty poor prognosis, so they went down the experimental route. But the hospital that they went to basically falsely promised that they had a 80-90% chance of curing the cancer using a immunotherapy technique not cleared in any country for treating the cancer that he had. I remember reading in one of the articles in Chinese that the technique was already proven to be ineffective against sarcomas. So the issue is that basically the hospital lied. And finally, the kicker of all of this pile of crap, is that the hospital that performed the procedure wasn't even the hospital that was advertising on Baidu. The hospital that was advertising used to be a pretty famous hospital and it was a military hospital which used to be inaccessible to non-military personnel or their families (Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps). However, this has changed in the last several years, but to cope with the huge influx of the number of patients wanting to get the best, the hospital outsourced the cancer treatment to a different hospital. And the outsourced hospital could use the name "Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps) despite not actually being part of the hospital. The the worst part of all of this is that the outsourced hospital also named one other famous organization in the cancer (specifically the immunology) field. They claimed that this treatment was a joint research with Stanford, which of course is a lie as well.

Re:Obvious response

[sjames]

He did go to a doctor. Alas, the doctor's ad claiming a high success rate with the cancer he had was a lie.

Re:

[magarity]

He did go to a doctor. Alas, the doctor's ad claiming a high success rate with the cancer he had was a lie.

The article is skimpy on hard numbers. As in, there aren't any. What percentage recovery rate did the hospital claim in their ads? Anything less than 100% and it isn't immediately obvious that because one patient didn't make it then the claim was an outright lie. Who knows; maybe they say "we have high percentage survival rates!!**" and then in the bottom corner "** a high rate is 50% survival after 1 year". Even in US hospitals cancer survival rates are in terms of surviving a few years, not the remainder

Re:

[stealth_finger]

Even if they claim, and there actually is a 80/90% survival rate, then that still means 10/20% of people die.

Re:

[sjames]

Sure, but if the guy was just unlucky, there's not a big investigation. Here there's a question of the treatment he got having any useful effect on his type of cancer.

Darwin Wins!

[Anonymous Coward]

Flawless Victory

country evolution

[supernova87a]

Well, actually, it sounds like the Chinese government is realizing it needs its own version of the FDA.

The FDA in the US is so effective and yet underfunded, that we could afford to increase its budget by multiple x, and it would still be a wise expenditure of government funds. That organization protects us from far more than we give credit for.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have their own version of the FDA. http://eng.sfda.gov.cn/WS03/CL0755/

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the GOP was going to get rid of all those liberal Job stealing Agencies.

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

China DOES have a regulatory agency. Why on Earth did you assume they don't? Oh, right, so you can change the subject to America and bitch and moan. The topic's not always about you, narcissist.

Re:

[skam240]

What the hell are you talking about? For starters, yes China does have their own version of the FDA but they clearly do a terrible job. Tons of products such as infant formula are actively sought after from foreign markets as Chinese consumers dont trust their domestic goods. I read about major food scandals in China every few months that dwarf anything that happens in Western nations.

So yes, technically the above poster is wrong but what's with all this narcissist garbage?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[wvmarle]

Sure the Chinese government is doing a poor job in this, but they are not the only ones to blame. They are not the ones that put the melamine in the milk powder in the first place: that were manufacturers, trying to "improve" the test results (for nitrogen/protein content) so they could pass the tests.

Many US manufacturers are very careful with their products, and not just because of the FDA. They care about their business and they care about the health of the people that eat or drink their product. Often f

Re:

[Joe_Dragon]

And that worked so well why keep listing that line?

moderation system at /. down?

[sittingnut]

seems very little moderation (use of points)seems to be taking place here nowadays (as in this post, as of this time).
has the overall moderation points awarded gone down?
is that deliberate decision on the part of new owners/editors?
or have the people earning points gone down? as more people lose interest due to left wing biased political, and other rather idiotic non technology, stories.

or both?

Re:

[NicBenjamin]

I've gotten plenty of mod-points lately. A couple 15-pointers in the past 2-3 weeks. First time that's happened in months.

But they only give me three days to spend them, when I could have sworn in the past it was a full week.

Re:

[skam240]

I get mod points all the time. Stop being a negative nancy.

Re:

[sittingnut]

good to know you got points.
but looking at comment ratings, it is clear not much mod points are being spent in aggregate .
may be somebody should do a study comparing mod points spent in older threads and newer ones with similar number of comments.

Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps

[tomalpha]

So I know it might only be a name, but what's the Beijing Armed Police Corps [ebeijing.gov.cn] doing running a hospital?
That's more terrifying than the regular terrifying news that comes out of China these days.

Re:

[wvmarle]

Just like the US army has their own hospitals, prisons, research organisations, etc. You just normally don't hear about them as it's for military personnel only, and maybe then even only for work related cases.

The difference is that in communist countries the army has preferential treatment. As a result, military hospitals get the best equipment, can hire the best doctors, etc. This is of course an incentive for people to join the army and to remain loyal. Often also close family members can use the militar

An article about China

[Kinthelt]

Bring in the shills.