  Linden, Massar and Popescu have recently given an optimization argument to
show that a single two-qubit Werner state, or any other mixture of the
maximally entangled Bell states, cannot be purified by local operations and
classical communications. We generalise their result and give a simple
explanation. In particular, we show that no purification scheme using local
operations and classical communications can produce a pure singlet from any
mixed state of two spin-1/2 particles. More generally, no such scheme can
produce a maximally entangled state of any pair of finite-dimensional systems
from a generic mixed state. We also show that the Werner states belong to a
large class of states whose fidelity cannot be increased by such a scheme.
