Expired skin cream charges levelled

Drug store chains Watson's and Cosmed are selling hand cream products that have passed their expiration date, DPP legislators alleged yesterday.

DPP lawmaker Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) organized a press conference yesterday to make public evidence that the drug stores have been selling a hand cream well past the product's expiration date.

The skin cream, which contains camomile glycerin, was manufactured in Germany by Herbacin Cosmetic GmbH.

Cho and his colleagues demanded an explanation from the Department of Health, which oversees the sale of cosmetics in Taiwan, and the drug store chains.

According to Herbacin Cosmetic, coding on the packaging of one sample of hand cream -- obtained from Watson's two months ago -- indicated that the product was manufactured in 1996 and expired a year ago.

The allegations came to light after Lee Hung-chun (李鴻均), an exclusive agent for Herbacin Cosmetic's hand cream in Taiwan, found the Germany company's product on the store shelves of Watson's.

Lee supplies neither Watson's nor Cosmed, and believes the skin cream was probably imported by an unauthorized agent.

Because he's a distributor of Herbacin Cosmetic's hand cream, he could tell by the product's packaging that the cream had expired.

"I don't mean to attack the drug store chains," Lee said yesterday, adding that he was calling attention to the expired hand cream to raise consumer awareness.

The hand cream's package sold at Watson's says the product's expiration date is three years after its date of manufacture.

But as DPP lawmaker Chen Chin-chun (陳景峻) noted, the packages don't state clearly when the product was made. "Consumers cannot confirm the expiry date of the product, as the date of manufacture is not printed on the product, but merely contained within a code number," Chen said.

Watson's was not available for comment yesterday.

Cosmed, which is a part of the President (統一) Drug Store Business Corp, said the product labels on which the hand cream's expiry date is printed were supplied by its importer.

"The importer said that the printing of a wrong expiry date on the product was a careless mistake," said Kao Ming-yii (高明義), Cosmed's marketing manager. "But we are further investigating," he said.

Cosmed's importer could not be reached for comment.

Kao said the drug chain inspects stock according to data supplied by its importer -- which is in Chinese -- and isn't able to cross-check with the data in its original language because Cosmed doesn't receive the information.

DPP lawmaker Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) yesterday raised doubts about the government's ability to supervise the sale of cosmetics.

But Tseng Chien-fang (曾千芳), deputy director-general of the Bureau of Pharmaceutical Affairs under the health department, said that Taiwan follows international practice when it comes to cosmetic sales.

Because cosmetics are not drugs, they don't need to be registered with the health department before being sold.

As for providing consumers the ability to determine a cosmetic product's expiration, Tseng said that there is no uniform practice for labeling a product.

As for the government's responsibility, Tseng said it was up to local health bureaus to watch out for products that have been inappropriately labeled or that are being sold past their expiration date. She said that the frequency of sampling inspections depends on the assignment load of each bureau.