Supposed wonder remedies are doing a roaring trade but claims they can conquer

HONG KONG'S craze for shark-related health supplements has hit the headlines again over the past few days with fresh warnings against treating these popular pills as a miracle cure.

New research exposing bogus claims that products made from shark cartilage can cure cancer was splashed across the front-page of Apple Daily on Friday.

The supplements are widely sold in the SAR, often with pills made from shark liver oil, at prices ranging from $100 to $800 per bottle. Curing cancer is just one of the many tantalising claims retailers have used to lure customers into buying both pills. They have also suggested these cure or fight against everything from diabetes, rheumatism and liver disease to improving the skin and the body's metabolic rate. Sometimes the claims are so ambiguous that consumers may be easily misled.

But the findings by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University in the United States - reported in Apple Daily - have shown that sharks and related fish can develop a variety of benign and cancerous tumours. This debunks the common belief that sharks are not susceptible to cancer.

Professor Gary Ostrander, Johns Hopkins professor of biology and comparative medicine, says: 'People are out there slaughtering sharks and taking shark cartilage pills based on very faulty data and no preventive studies to show that it works.' In Hong Kong, Thomas Leung Wai-tong, honorary consultant at the department of clinical oncology at the Prince of Wales Hospital, says he would not recommend shark products to cancer patients.

Similar concerns surfaced earlier this year when the Consumer Council raised serious doubts about the multiple claims associated with shark liver oil in the January issue of its monthly publication, Choice.