Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an updated warning about skin care products that may contain mercury, including many anti-aging, smoothing, skin-lightening, and beauty lotions and creams sold at ethnic beauty shops and online. Some of the tainted personal care products, most of which are imported, have been found to contain mercury levels far higher than acceptable limits, including one product that reportedly contained 131,000 times the acceptable limit of mercury.
You can view a list of the mercury-contaminated products tested by MDH here:
http://www.health.state.mn.us/topics/skin/
Similarly, a 2010 report by the Chicago Tribune (CT) found that out of 50 skin-lightening creams tested, six contained levels of mercury so high that they are technically illegal. And just like what was found in the MDH study, the CT study revealed that most of the creams containing mercury had levels in the thousands of parts per million, which is known to cause kidney damage and other serious health problems (http://articles.chicagotribune.com).
“Many of these products are coming into the country through channels we can’t easily track, such as international mail and personal baggage,” said Gary Coody, national health fraud coordinator at the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA). “That’s why it’s so important for consumers and sellers to know about the dangers of possible mercury poisoning associated with the use of these skin products.”
The FDA warns that most of these products are illegal to begin with, and that many of them technically constitute “unapproved drugs,” for which the agency is permitted to step in and pull them from the market. But as it stands, many of these tainted products continue to remain on store shelves across the country, including in the states of California, New York, Virginia, and Texas.
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