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Fiona Tam

Three women suing two popular cosmetic surgery hospitals and an insurer for more than  a million yuan over toxic gel implants they received eight years ago had their first hearing in a Shenzhen court yesterday.
The session came as 21 gel victims in Jilin province  seek 12.5 million yuan (HK$14.2 million) in similar cases.
Yao Youping, of Zhejiang province , and two women from Shenzhen lodged claims against Shenzhen Fuhua Hospital  and Shenzhen Sunshine Hospital  for irreparable damage and mental anguish incurred by injections of defective hydrophilic polyacrylamide gel,  or PAAG, at the hospitals.
The gel injections were given as part of breast augmentation surgery in 2000 and 2001.
The People's Insurance Company of China  was also listed as a defendant for providing product-quality insurance to Fuhua Hospital, PAAG's manufacturer, during those years.
The women are seeking a combined 1.33 million yuan.
The Shenzhen hearing ended yesterday with a decision to reconvene in several months, with no set date.
According to the  Product Quality Law, manufacturers are liable for compensation if any defective product has caused damage to a person's body or property.
The gel is believed to have been used in an estimated 300,000 procedures on the mainland before a flood of consumer complaints and warnings from the Hong Kong Consumer Council  led to its banning  two years ago.
Both hospitals rejected the plaintiffs' claims yesterday, saying PAAG was licensed by the State Food and Drug Administration for cosmetic surgery between 2000 and 2006.
'China's Product Quality Law has exempted manufacturers from responsibility if we can prove that the science and technology at the time the product was put in circulation was not  able to detect the defect,' Fuhua Hospital lawyer Li Jun  told the court.
Mr Li said the administration's licence was evidence that technology at the time could not pick up the product's defects, and therefore, the hospital was not liable for  damage.
But mainland media have reported that officials took bribes in return for giving PAAG production licences.
The insurance company's lawyer said the company had insured Fuhua Hospital to manufacture the PAAG products and terminated the coverage after learning that Fuhua had told PAAG customers that they also were covered by the policy, which was untrue.
Zhuo Xiaoqin , the lawyer for all 24 PAAG plaintiffs who is also the chief legal consultant for the Ministry of Health, said both hospitals had twisted the meaning of 'defective product'.
'There were no regulations or quality tests for melamine in dairy products before the tainted milk scandal, but it doesn't mean that those manufacturers involved were not responsible for children diagnosed with kidney stones,' he said.
Mr  Zhuo  said he was confident of his case given the victims' medical records, the administration's ban on PAAG in 2006 and medical experts' testimony.



Hospitals, insurer sued over toxic gel implants