Angela Xu/Shanghai Daily news

A sales assistant weighs raw anise spice at a Shanghai Lei Yun Shang Pharmaceutical store yesterday.-Zhang Suoqing

Consumers are frantically buying raw anise spice in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the nation's major producer, in the mistaken belief that it will ward off or cure bird flu, experts said.
There's no panic buying in Shanghai, however.
Medical experts said the raw ingredient is useless against bird flu.
While processed and chemically compounded anise is a key ingredient in Roche's Tamiflu, an effective flu medication, the raw unprocessed spice is useless, experts said.
"The extraction from star anise becomes an effective ingredient of Tamiflu only after its structure is changed by complicated chemical processing," said scientist Wu Jiarui.
"So star anise itself is totally useless to control bird flu.' Wu is vice president of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
At local agricultural products wholesale markets, supermarkets and stores selling specialities from South China, there were no remarkable sales.
"The price and sales remain the same. Few people come to buy star anise every day," said a shop assistant in the Sanyang South China Food Store on the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall.
"I rarely use star anise as flavoring when cooking and I have never heard it's effective against flu," said Feng Lin, a local housewife.
The current retail price of star anise is 125 yuan (US$15) per km. But at the Guangxi Yulin Star Anise Market, the nation's largest star anise wholesale market, prices last month hit a three-year-record of 9 yuan per km according to China Business News.