Several brands of children’s raincoats have been found to contain excessive amounts of plasticizers and lead, the Department of Consumer Protection said yesterday.
“Because many elementary schools require their students to wear raincoats instead of using umbrellas, it is necessary to ensure that the raincoats are not posing a health hazard to children,” department Director-General Liu Ching-fang (劉清芳) said.
Twenty-one samples of different brands taken from various outlets including department stores, wholesalers and retailers were randomly selected for tests, according to the department.
The products, which were all made in China or Vietnam, were inspected to see if they are properly labeled and contain levels of migratable lead and plasticizers above the legally allowed limits for children’s products.
Migratable lead is the amount of lead that a product exudes when it is exposed to a solvent.
Of the 21 raincoats inspected, only three passed all the safety testes, while two others — both imported from Vietnam —failed to pass any of them, Consumer Ombudsman Chang Chia-lin (張嘉麟) said.
“Two of the samples were found to contain an amount of lead in excess of the maximum accepted migration level, which is 90mg per kilogram. As many as 15 of the tested products also contained more plasticizers than national standards permit,” Chang said.
“The raincoat with the highest concentration of plasticizers had 297 times the accepted amount, while nine items had levels at least 200 times above the allowed limit,” Chang said.
“It’s worth noting that both the least and the most expensive samples were substandard in terms of their plasticizers content and labeling,” showing that price is not a good indicator of quality, Senior Consumer Ombudsman Wang Te-ming (王德明) said.
Liu said that the department will ask the Ministry of Economic Affairs to step up efforts to regulate the labeling of children’s raincoats and make such products subject to periodic inspections.
Exposure to excessive amounts of lead can damage children’s mental and physical health, for example by compromising their central nervous or renal systems, said Rao Yu-chen (饒玉珍), an official with the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection, adding that prolonged contact with plasticizers could disrupt endocrine functions or lead to cancer.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods