By A MOTHER'S STANDARDS, ANDREA De Cruz didn't need to lose weight. But show business imposes strict requirements on appearance, and when the dial on the Singaporean TV actress's bathroom scales spun to more than 48 kilos, de Cruz started taking a Chinese diet pill named Slim 10 that she purchased from a colleague. Two months later, de Cruz, 28, was near death unconscious in a hospital in Singapore. Doctors at first were baffled. But they came to suspect that an ingredient in the diet drug had ravaged her liver, which had all but shut down.
De Cruz's life was saved by an emergency transplant after her fiance, actor Pierre Png, donated half his own liver. She now takes immunosuppressant, which keep her body from rejecting the transplant but leave her weak and vulnerable to further illness. She's wary of planning her wedding to Png, more than a year away, fearing she may not survive that long. "I feel I'm still living a nightmare," she says. She is, at any rate, still living. In June, fellow Singaporean Selvarani Raja, a 43-year-old logistics manager at Singapore Technologies, died from liver failure. She had started taking the same diet supplement, Slim 10, in April.
With body consciousness increasingly becoming an obsession, Asians are overgrazing the smorgasbord of weight-loss products and "miracle" diet aids, ranging from "fat reducing" pressurized boots to expensive massage regimens. Nobody knows how many are buying untested products of dubious efficacy-certainly consumers number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Some, however, are proving to be deadly. Over the past two years, seven women in Japan, Singapore and China have died due to the toxicity of the substances they ingested in the hope of shedding offending kilograms. From differing ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds and ranging in age from 16 to 60, the women had one thing in common: like De Cruz, they were all taking Chinese-made diet pills containing a variant of fenfluramine, an appetite suppressant that has been banned in the U.S. since 1997 for damaging heart valves. Doctors and health officials in Asia now believe the newer compound, called N-nitroso fenfluramine, can cause liver failure.
The deaths- as well as more than 600 illnesses linked in Japan to Chinese diet pills - have alerted health authorities to a hazard they have been almost powerless to stop. Similar drugs were implicated in deaths in China last year, with scores more falling ill in Korea and Hong Kong, Japan last month banned 24 types of Chinese diet drugs - many containing N-nitrosofenfluramine - and rushed through new laws placing the burden on importers to prove product safety or face a fine of up to $26,000. Just last week, health officials in China published a ban on 13 diet products, seven of which were found to contain fenfluramine.
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