Beginning on Aug. 15, plastic baby bottle manufacturers will be fined if their products fail to meet new safety standards for Bisphenol A (BPA) and will have to pull them from the shelves, Department of Health officials said yesterday.
BPA is a synthetic molecule widely used in plastics, epoxy resins and other products. Studies have suggested that it could be linked to health problems and diseases such as cancer, heart disease and infertility.
Under the new rules, baby bottles cannot have more than 30 parts per billion of Bisphenol A after being soaked in 95˚C water and a 60˚C solution of 4 percent acetic acid for 30 minutes, the Bureau of Food Safety said.
“There is no mercy period for the new regulation. If your baby bottles fail the test, you will be asked to withdraw them from the market and your company will be fined,” bureau director Lin Sheue-rong (林雪蓉) said, adding that the fine will be between NT$30,000 and NT$150,000.
The new rule means Taiwan, along with the EU, will have the toughest BPA standards in the world, she said, adding that the bureau would help manufacturers to develop replacement materials.
Lin said consumers to boil baby bottles before using them for the first time because this will remove most of the BPA, if there is any.
“If scratches begin to form on the bottle, this is a sign that you should replace it,” she said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching