A health ministry hotline has been flooded with calls from people nationwide worried about whether they have hepatitis C, after the government announced Thursday that it has a list of nearly 7,000 medical institutions that handled the tainted blood coagulant fibrinogen before 1994.
According to ministry officials, in the eight hours to midnight Thursday, it received 198 calls, 149 of them from former patients of hospitals on the list. And since Friday newspapers hit the street with news of the list, the 20 phone lines have kept ringing, they said.
About 290,000 people were given fibrinogen, which was distributed by the now-defunct Green Cross Corp., between 1980 to 2001 and around 10,000 have developed hepatitis C, according to an estimate by Mitsubishi Pharma Corp., which absorbed Green Cross.