Urinine to tell you a new story

We are now back in Shanghai for the rest of the summer and what better way to start a summer blog than tell you about the shortage of urine facing Chinese Pharma companies.

Seems all of a sudden plastic buckets are showing up at toilets in some elementary schools in an east China city that are being used by pharmaceutical companies to collect urine to make medicine, a national TV station reported.

It was previously reported in the Chinese media that residents in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province were surprised to see the red plastic buckets at boys' toilets at schools and shocked to see workers taking the buckets, full of urine to trucks every afternoon.

"Why you might ask are people bothering to collect and transport boys' urine especially when this is not virgin egg season?"

In response, some schools told China Central Television that a pharmaceutical company was collecting the urine to extract urokinase, a product that dissolves blood clots and which is widely used in the treatment of thrombotic diseases.  The schools said they weren't being paid to provide the urine.

Here's the real issue - pharmaceutical companies are finding it more and more difficult to collect urine because of improved hygiene in China's public toilets. How do you like that!!

Pharmaceutical companies used to collect urine by placing buckets at public toilets the station said. Large amounts were needed as only dozens of grams of the product could be abstracted from one ton of human urine.

But with the improvement in hygiene, the companies are no longer allowed to place buckets at toilets in major cities and they have to head to small villages or seek other ways of collecting urine.

A manager surnamed Yu with a company that was collecting pupils' urine told the TV station that some schools rejected their requests by saying that the buckets would be too smelly.  To make matters worse, Chinese pharmaceutical companies producing urokinase are facing strong competition from foreign companies who see China as the ideal place to collect urine given its huge population and I would guess very few ways to collect it in their own countires.

Medical experts are calling on residents to support urine collection at public toilets to ensure supplies so when you come to visit the small towns and villages of China, do your part and stop by any urinal you see that has a red bucket and make a donation.