All media and medical organizations have been given three months from Tuesday to stop publishing and issuing medical advertisements, said Wu Min, an official from the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Industry and Commerce Tuesday.

A new report issued by the Shanghai advertisement monitoring center showed that 362 out of the 453 monitored medical advertisements in March were illegal or against regulations.

Some medical advertisements are carried by newspapers, T.V., and radio in forms of special reports, health hotlines, and popular science education. Wu told Xinhua that the country's laws and regulations demanded that all medical ads must be "true, healthy, scientific and accurate", and the content must be in accordance with that approved by public health administration departments.

However, some medical organizations and media units ignored the above requirements and continued to publish and carry various kinds of illegal and unqualified advertisements.

Wu Min said that all provincial or municipal-level public health administration departments were prohibited from approving medical advertisements, and the Shanghai Municipal Public Health Bureau stopped approving medical advertisements from April 16 last year, while the validity period of all medical advertisement is set for one year.

According to Wu, medical advertisements now appearing in Shanghai are overdue or unlicensed, all of which will be cleared up in the coming three months.

(Xinhua News Agency April 17, 2002)