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In news that will make you want to shut the blinds, go back to bed until next week ... there's disturbing news out of South Korea that since August, officials have found over 17,000 pills filled with human flesh, in particular the placentas and ground up bodies of dead Chinese babies.

Feel free to walk away from your computer and shake your head for the next few minutes. Are you back? Still have faith in humanity? Here we go ... as disturbing as the contents of the pills is this detail about how they're made: "bodies [of Chinese babies] were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder." And now you'll really want to walk away as we tell you that people were, as the Associated Press' Hyung-Jin Kim reports, consuming these pills as stamina and enhancement boosters and putting themselves at risk. "It was confirmed those capsules contain materials harmful to the human body, such as super bacteria. We need to take tougher measures to protect public health," a customs official said in a report by The Korea Times (which was translated and picked up by the BBC).

But back to the babies, this disgusting report might just be official confirmation that this Korean documentary revealing the scary process (it aired last August) is actually true (WARNING: please put your coffee down and finish your breakfast before reading this next part) "Supposedly, the television team paid a lot of money to get some of the pills, and when they tested them, found the pills’ contents were 99.7 percent human, and were also able to discern the babies’ gender from the powder, as well as found hair and nail remnants," reads Geekosystem's report on the documentary, which notes that the babies are "mostly" stillbirths and abortions.

Photos by Jordache via Shutterstock (not actual dead baby pills)

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.