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Toxic chairs from China lead to skin problems in France

After toxic baby milk, now there are toxic chairs from China.

Customers in France who bought Chinese-made recliners are complaining of stinging allergic rashes and infections.

One customer, Caroline Morin, said on Friday she was stunned to learn the chair she bought in December appeared to have caused the skin problems she suffered for months.

“You sit comfortably on something and in fact you have a bomb under your butt,” she said.

The French distributor, Conforama, warned clients in July that some of the chairs and sofas presented an allergy risk “in rare cases.”

It has withdrawn them from sale and recently said the health problems were linked to an anti-fungal chemical in the chairs.

The affair gained attention this week following French media reports exposing problems suffered by people who bought the chairs.

One was Dolores Ennrich, who said that because of long-term illness she spent a lot of time sitting in the recliner she purchased in March last year.

She said she suffered painful eczema and skin infections on her left thigh, back and left arm that put her in a hospital for 12 days and led doctors to prescribe repeated courses of antibiotics.

“It went away, it came back, it went away. That went on for more than a year,” she said. “It is very painful.”

Conforama said it has severed its commercial ties with the Chinese supplier, Linkwise, and told its other suppliers to no longer use the chemical, dimethyl fumarate, to prevent mold.

Linkwise is based in the manufacturing hub of Dongguan in southern China.

A man who answered the phone at the company said on Friday that it was working with the Chinese government’s quality inspection watchdog to investigate the problem. He would not give details, his name or title.

Floods of cheap Chinese products on world markets have also been accompanied in recent years by scares over poor quality, particularly involving food.

The latest Chinese product crisis involved baby formula made from milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. It has been blamed for the deaths of four babies and illnesses in 6,200 in China. Previous scandals involved contaminated seafood, toothpaste and a pet food ingredient, also tainted with melamine, blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats in the US.

“Chinese, it’s really dangerous. There’s the chairs. The milk ...” Ennrich said. “We pay less but there are consequences.”

Normally, just one sachet of the anti-mold chemical is meant to be inserted into the chairs, but some contained as many as 10, Conforama spokeswoman Stephanie Mathieu said.

She said the Chinese firm told Conforama that “as it was the monsoon season they decided that they needed to put more sachets in.”

Conforama said it sold 38,000 of the Linkwise chairs and that customers have so far returned 800 of them.
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