Russia has banned the shipment of medical specimens abroad, threatening hundreds of patients and complicating drug trials by major companies, the national Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Kommersant attributed the ban to fears in the secret service that Russian genetic material could be used abroad to make biochemical weapons targeting Russians. The quality daily cited anonymous sources in the medical community.

The ban, initiated by the Ministry of Health and carried out by the Federal Customs Service, began on 28 May. Shipment beyond Russia’s borders of all biological material, including hair and blood, has been blocked.

“If this is true, it will hit us like a cannonball” due to the centre’s reliance on processing of medical specimens abroad, Aleksei Maschan, director of the Central Children’s Hospital, Moscow, told the newspaper.


Secret service warning

The ban may also complicate clinical trials by major pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, which runs trials on tens of thousands of Russians.

The Russian Customs Service and Ministry of Health refused to comment on the reports.

An anonymous medical source linked the ban to a report by the FSB secret service in May 2007, that he said warned of Russian genetic material being used in Western clinics to prepare biological weapons that would harm only Russians.

Nikolai Yankovsky, head of the Russian Institute of Sciences’ General Genetics Institute, ridiculed the idea of a ban on transporting genetic material abroad. “Forbidding the shipment of one’s DNA abroad is impossible – I am my DNA,” he told Echo of Moscow radio.