The selling of tampons on online auction Web sites will be banned starting this Tuesday, according to a Department of Health order issued last week.
The department demanded that tampons, along with several other types of medical equipment, be forbidden from being sold online. The order was delivered to a popular Internet auction site last weekend.
The department said that tampons were considered medical appliances, and thus could not be sold online. Only pharmacists with a license can sell medical products, it added.
The department's Pharmaceutical Affairs Division director Lin Hsiu-chuan (林秀娟) said the nation models its categorization of medical appliances on the US Food and Drug Administration's classifications.
As a result, the department imposed regulations on selling tampons when they were first introduced into Taiwan, she said.
Using tampons is riskier than sanitary towels because they are inserted into the body, Lin said, adding that the country also requires manufacturers to put instructions and warnings on Tampon boxes.
The department said buying tampons from online sellers may not guarantee buyers good after-sale service or product safety.
However, for online sellers and buyers of tampons, the ban is set to cause much inconvenience.
A tampon seller surnamed Yu called the department's ban the result of "old-fashioned thinking." She said tampons have been a necessity in Western countries for years and are environmentally friendly.
She said the department was ignoring the popularity of the online method of buying.
"The Internet is a trend. They [the department] should keep this in mind," she said.
Huang Hsiao-hui (黃曉惠), a 32-year-old housewife, said she could not understand why tampons were considered medical appliances.
As she is allergic to sanitary towels, Huang said she has been buying US and Japanese branded tampons online for more than two years.
She said she would feel more at ease if there were a trustworthy platform to buy tampons online, but the department had now taken this option away.
Huang said if the department would not allow tampons to be sold on the Internet, it could at least make tampons widely available in other places.
According to an article written by Cheng Ling-fang (成令方), chairwoman of the Graduate Institute of Gender Study at Kaohsiung Medical University, and Hsu Pei-hsin (許培欣), a teacher at Tung Fang Institute of Technology in the Chinese-language China Times in early March, only 2.1 percent of women in Taiwan use tampons, while up to 81 percent of women in the US are tampon users.
Cheng and Hsu said the low usage rate for tampons in Taiwan should be attributed to "the department's old-fashioned regulations."
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,