MOST new mothers, immersed in the joy of their babies, pay little attention to the way hospitals dispose of their placentas. Outside the delivery room, however, people are busy thinking of how to make a profit from the discarded tissue.

In order to stop the illegal trade in placentas and the trend in some places to serve them up as special dishes in restaurants- in Harbin of Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province for instance - the Ministry of Health has recently re-affirmed that placentas remain the property of the women who deliver them and no one else is permitted to sell them.

Disputable value

Placentas are considered a "valuable material" in Chinese medicine. The "tiny room" where the fetus dwells for ten months, containing large amounts of protein and hormones, is called "zi he che," a material that can be dried and powdered to make into medicine to treat lung disease, or into a tonic that is good for kidneys. In traditional circles, placentas are cooked and eaten as a health-giving dish.

"Placentas are dried and powdered and used as an effective medicine to enhance the functions of the kidney and to treat asthma," said Cai Gan, chief director of the Chinese Medicine Department of Shuguang Hospital.

The tradition that Chinese people use human placentas as medicine or health food can be dated back thousands of years, according to Han Yanmin, from the north of the country, whose family has practised Chinese medicine for several generations.

"Even today, people in my hometown make placenta pills by themselves in a traditional way," he said. "First we dry and stir-fry the placenta on a piece of tile rather than an iron wok, because iron would destroy certain ingredients of the placenta. The placenta is then powdered and mixed with honey."

Han said people also cook placentas as fortifying dishes for weak patients.

Placenta sales

Before the Health Ministry announcement was made, hospitals collected placentas without asking the permission of the new mothers, claiming to burn them in hospital incinerators. Yet loopholes occurred in the process. Some people who knew doctors or nurses in maternity departments would buy placentas, either to cook themselves or to sell them to restaurants.

"It might happen in some suburban or small hospitals here, but Shanghai has not seen as much trade as other cities," said Yuan Kejian, deputy director of Ruijin Hospital. Yuan said very few women giving birth in Ruijin Hospital ever asked to keep their own placentas, even though they had now been given the right to do so. But he admitted that "on a very few occasions," some people who knew doctors or nurses would ask for placentas.

La Duanduan, director of the Maternity Department of the hospital, also denied that the hospital had ever engaged in placenta trading. She told the Shanghai Star that there are on average 30 to 50 babies born at the hospital every month. All the placentas from these deliveries would be incinerated in batches.

But when asked whether the number of collected placentas was checked to see if it corresponded to the number of new-borns, Yuan avoided answering the question.

Individuals purchasing placentas often use them as nutritional ingredients to cook at home, believing the folk wisdom that they make a good tonic to improve health. Processing them into medicine was rarer, Yuan said, because of the high cost and complex equipment required to extract hormones from them.

According to La, from the viewpoint of Western medicine cooked placentas would not be as healthy as people believed because they consist mostly of protein, which ordinary food also contains, while their more exotic ingredients would be destroyed when cooked at high temperatures.

However, viruses contained by the placentas might not be destroyed even after cooking. La said placentas might carry AIDS, hepatitis and other viruses and hospitals should pay serious attention to such dangers. That was another reason for prohibiting the illegal trade of the tissue.

She said if the new mother asked to take her own placenta back home, the hospital would permit it, if no infectious diseases were detected and the 500-gram-or-so organ was handed over to the women right after delivery. "But this situation is actually very rare. We don't know what they use them for," La said.

Most people interviewed by the Shanghai Star said they would not be interested in eating a placenta, but they nevertheless understood why others might eat them to improve their health.

"They are supposed to be good for weak patients," said Judy Zhu, a local white-collar worker.

Some people have consumed dishes made from placenta without being told what they were eating, because their family members hoped to improve their health conditions but feared they would reject the food if told what it was.

Zhu said one of her friends had eaten a dish that he had assumed was braised pork. When told it was really placenta, he felt uncomfortable about it.

Even mothers and mothers-to-be said it did not, or would not, bother them if they found out someone had eaten the placenta that came from their bodies.

"It will not be useful to me after my baby is born. I wouldn't care at all - it's like peasants using human's dung to fertilize crops," said Shen Hao, who expects to give birth to her baby in August.

Her opinions were echoed by another young mother Tian Xiuzhen: "As long as it really helps others, I don't care where it has gone or how it is used. It never occurred to me to ask for it back after delivery."

So far, only the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products (SIBP) has been certified as a designated unit for collecting placentas from hospitals. According to the local News Times, SIBP paid hospitals 5 yuan (60US cents) for each placenta as a "service charge" - hospitals provide refrigerators to keep the placentas and pay for the electricity required.

Sources with SIBP said it was expensive to process placentas into medical preparations, involving more than 20 different procedures. One kilogram of placenta powder sells for about 400 to 600 yuan (US$48 to 72) in the market.