The latest trend in illegal trafficking: fetal tissue
South Korean officials today released information on a gruesome new trend in illegal trafficking: human flesh, powdered and sold in gelatin capsules. 35 smuggling attempts have been intercepted at Incheon Airport in Seoul (for obvious reasons, there is no estimate on how many smuggling attempts were successful) since last August.
So far, according to the BBC, no one has been arrested in any of these smuggling intercepts. The amounts confiscated have been deemed "small" and "not for resale." Apparently South Korean drug tourists are visiting China in order to buy human tissue capsules, and bringing them home in their luggage.
The pills are being smuggled in from China, and the Chinese government has announced that it will take steps to investigate this trade. Most of the human flesh used in the pills is reportedly from fetuses and placentas. An investigation last August was unable to turn up proof that the capsules were being manufactured in China.
Aside from being revolting and violating one of most societies' ultimate taboos, the capsules can cause dangerous illness as well. The remains have apparently been dried on stoves and turned into powder, but this will certainly not kill prion diseases like Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease. Additionally, lab scientists report having detected measurable levels of bacterial contamination in the capsules.
The human flesh capsules are reportedly being taken as "stamina boosters," which is to say as an impotence cure. Some people also regard them as an all-purpose miracle cure, useful against a broad spectrum of illnesses and diseases.
According to the Chinese government, no such human flesh pills or trafficking has been uncovered in China. But according to rumor, corrupt Chinese doctors are being bribed to supply the bodies of still-born or aborted babies to the illegal medicine trade.
And according to the SUPER RELIABLE Daily Mail, "there have been disturbing reports that some babies were those who had perished in China's "dying rooms," where youngsters are deliberately left to die because they were born into families that already had the limit of one child in country areas."
The existence of "dying rooms," long denied by the Chinese government, was proven in a 1995 documentary. Filmmakers documented a room in a rural orphanage where the children (mainly girls, who are abandoned by their families at a much higher rate due to Chinese cultural norms which favor boys) deemed least likely to survive and be adopted were locked up and left to die.