Consumer Protection Committee inspections of household rubber gloves yesterday showed that 68 percent failed to meet required standards as they contained excessive levels of plasticizers or had been labeled incorrectly, with one item containing about 253 times the legal limit for plasticizers.
Many families give their houses a deep clean before the Lunar New Year, an act that symbolizes getting rid of last year’s bad luck and welcoming in good luck, so a lot of rubber gloves are sold over the period every year.
The committee inspected 19 brands of rubber gloves made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and found seven of the products contained plasticizers exceeding legal limits and 10 were mislabeled, with only six brands passing inspections, consumer ombudsman Wang Te-ming (王德明) said.
Under the terms of Chinese National Standard (CNS) 6632, the amount of six types of plasticizers used in making rubber gloves cannot make up more than 0.1 percent of the item’s mass, he said.
Among the seven gloves that failed the plasticizers examination, two products contained plasticizer levels exceeding the limit by more than 250 times, and four products exceeded the limit by 200 times, he said, adding that the committee has asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs to take legal action and require the companies to recall their products.
Consumer Protection Committee Director-General Liu Chin-fang (劉清芳) suggested that people wash their hands thoroughly if they eat after using rubber gloves, to avoid swallowing plasticizer residue.
Ten items were mislabeled — mostly because they did not print an expiration date, company information, country of origin or constituent materials, Wang said.
“When people choose rubber gloves, they should not buy those that smell bad or abnormal in any way,” Wang said, adding that several of the gloves that contained excessive levels of plasticizers smelled bad or fragrances had been added to them to alter their odor.
Consumers should pay attention to the expiration date of rubber gloves, because gloves made before the legal limits were set might contain high levels of plasticizers, he said.
“Goves that cost about NT$160 per pair contained plasticizers about 250 times the legal limit, while the committee examined gloves that cost about NT$30 that passed the inspection,” Wang said.
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