KOLKATA - Faulty blood-testing kits for HIV and hepatitis may have been fraudulently sold to government clinics across India, possibly resulting in people receiving transfusions of infected blood, officials said on Thursday.

The government is seizing kits across the country and has ordered a probe into the possible fraud after two brothers appeared in a Kolkata court on Monday accused of selling hundreds of thousands of blood-testing kits long past their expiry date.

A woman stands before a banner featuring a large red ribbon, the internationally-known symbol of AIDS prevention. India is making perilous mistakes in its fight against AIDS by assuming the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is being spread overwhelmingly by sex and especially by prostitutes, a study warns. [AFP]

Govind and Ghansyam Sharma, whose company Monozyme India has several contracts to supply the kits to the government, deny charges of malpractice and forgery.

Both are still in police custody after being denied bail.

"The Kolkata police findings have a strong nationwide connection and we have ordered seizures of kits from every other state," said P K Hota, who retired on Wednesday as India's health secretary.

"We will ... find out how many people have been infected by HIV or hepatitis and rectify the mistakes," he added.

The news follows a report published by Britain's Royal Society of Medicine which said that India dangerously underestimated the number of its estimated 5.7 million HIV-infected people who caught the virus through reused needles in hospitals and similar hygiene lapses.

The US researchers, writing in the society's International Journal of STD (sexually transmitted disease) and AIDS, said India is placing too much emphasis on preventing the sexual transmission of the virus.

India says more than 80 percent of HIV-infected people caught the virus while having sex, much of the time with prostitutes. The report says these figures are inflated and are blinding India to preventing other routes of transmission.

WHISTLEBLOWER

A tip-off from an employee at Monozyme resulted in police in the eastern state of West Bengal, of which Kolkata is the capital, finding more than 100,000 obsolete blood-test kits in blood banks across the state.

Monozyme India had supplied the kits, which are used to screen potential blood donors, to at least nine other Indian states, police in Kolkata said.

Two other medical supply companies are now also under investigation suspected of similar fraud.

There are already reports of people catching HIV after receiving blood from donors who were wrongly given the all-clear.

Sailen Ghosh, secretary of the Thalassaemia (a blood disorder) and AIDS Prevention Society in Kolkata, told Reuters he knew of at least six people who caught HIV in the last year after receiving routine blood transfusions.

Police said the number of people infected with HIV and hepatitis after receiving badly screened blood could run into thousands.