China has approved the use of bear bile to treat critically ill coronavirus patients.
The National Health Commission has recommended the use of Tan Re Qing – an injection that contains bear bile, goat horn and herbs – to treat patients with Covid-19.
But there is no evidence the mixture has any medicinal value.
Bear bile, which is produced in the liver and stored in the gall bladder, has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and fetches a high price in the illegal international market.
The move to approve its use has angered animal rights activists and comes just weeks after the country banned the sale of wild animals for food.
It is one of six traditional Chinese medicine products included in the directive.
President Xi Jinping has been keen to promote traditional medicine, calling it a “treasure of Chinese civilisation” and saying it should be given as much weight as other treatments.
The active ingredient in bear bile, ursodeoxycholic acid, is used to dissolve gallstones and treat liver disease but has no proven effectiveness in treating COVID-19.
China has used both traditional and Western medicine in its battle against the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 3,000 and infected more than 82,000.
But activists say greenlighting a treatment that uses an animal product is “both tragic and ironic” given that the origin of the deadly coronavirus is linked to the trade and consumption of wild animals.
“We shouldn’t be relying on wildlife products like bear bile as the solution to combat a deadly virus that appears to have originated from wildlife,” Brian Daly, a spokesman for the Animals Asia Foundation, told AFP.
The novel coronavirus is believed to have come from bats, but researchers think it might have spread to humans via an intermediate host mammal species.
