A curvaceous body is becoming the benchmark for beauty in China and many women are paying big bucks to attain that dream figure.

But up to 300,000 may have paid too high a price. The dream of beauty is in ruins; and worse, their health might have been irreparably damaged.

The women went through a popular operation to inject a colloidal liquid named Ao Mei Ding which translates as "man-made fat" into their breasts for enhancement.

Many are in such agony that they can hardly sleep; and some have had the harrowing experience of having their breasts removed to save their lives.

Even the more fortunate ones are not quite so because remnants of the liquid will stay in other parts of the body throughout their lives, causing pain and disease.

The liquid was made by Fu Hua Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd in northeast China's Jilin Province.

The company is a subsidiary of Shenzhen-based Fu Hua Group, which also owns three hospitals in Shanghai, Shenzhen of south China's Guangdong Province, and Changchun, capital of Jilin.

On April 30, China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), which had approved use of the liquid on a trial basis in 1999 and its production in 2000, reversed its decision and banned it, saying: "It continuously caused negative effects and consumer complaints, and the administration's monitoring centre believes its safety cannot be guaranteed."

Before the ban, Ao Mei Ding had been a very popular breast-enlarging injection used in many small and medium-sized hospitals and beauty salons in the country.

According to the Chinese-language Beijing Times, Ao Mei Ding received approval for trial use before it was tested on animals as regulations require.

No further information on that issue was available.

"Nothing but cry"

A woman in her late 20s in Zhuhai, a city on the country's southern coast in Guangdong, who called herself Xiao Cao, said she cried the whole night after hearing of the ban.

For countless nights after she had the liquid injected into her breasts 150 millilitres into each in 2003, she sat up for six or seven hours in her bed, not able to sleep because her breasts ached so much. Blood seeped out of her breasts after she gave birth in 2004.

And when she began lactating, she noticed it had a yellowish tinge.

"I was able to do nothing but cry because I was afraid that the injected liquid was in my milk," she said.

The failure of the attempted beautification of her bodyline even gave rise to quarrels between her and her husband. She began suffering from depression, and the couple eventually divorced last year.

Xiao Cao has had several operations to try to expel the liquid from her breasts, but they all failed. In the most recent one in July 2005 in Shenzhen, she lay in the hospital bed for six hours and watched doctors and nurses unfold the tops of her breasts and put their gloved hands into them and take out the coagulating liquid.

"Doctors had to use a laser to scalpel the coagulations, which had grown into the flesh," she said.

"I can never forget the smell of my flesh being burnt by the laser."

However, she still faces the threat of having to have her breasts removed because only half amount of the liquid has been removed.

Big profit

The Fu Hua Pharmaceutical Co Ltd was the Chinese distributor of a liquid for similar use produced by a Ukrainian company, but co-operation between the two sides broke up in 1998, according to Zhuo Xiaoqin, a lawyer and member of the board of directors of the Chinese Health Law Society, who has been investigating the Chinese company since 2000.

In 1999, the company asked for SFDA approval for the trial use of its new product,

It maintained Ao Mei Ding was invented by its own researchers and a few medical professors at Chinese universities.

It was approved for trial use in May 1999, trial production in December 1999 and then as a registered medical product in December 2000.

In the past five years it has been used in the three hospitals of the Fuhua Group and a number of hospitals and beauty salons around China.

"Major hospitals would never use Ao Mei Ding. It is the smaller hospitals and beauty salons that use it to gain big profits," said Zhang Yiming, director of plastic surgery at Wuhan Union Hospital.

The liquid was sold to hospitals and beauty salons for 6 yuan (US 75 cents) per millilitre, and they then sold it to consumers for between 20 and 70 yuan (US$2.50-8.75) per millilitre. At the top price of 70 yuan, a 300-millilitre procedure would net a profit of 19,200 yuan (US$2,400).

Small wonder, then, that some hospitals and beauty salons were bombarding women with sweet words about the "magical liquid."

More than 300,000 Chinese women have been injected with the liquid in the past five years, estimated Qiao Qun, director of plastic surgery at Peking Union Hospital, where she said more than 100 women come every year to have the liquid removed.

Chen Huanran, a doctor of the Plastic Surgery Hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, said he receives more than 30 victims every year at his hospital.

"Many fell upon their knees and some even kowtowed upon seeing me," he said. "Some of these women have rotting and disfigured breasts, which are too horrible to look at.

"The saddest part of the story is that the colloidal liquid will move to other parts of the body. It can never be totally removed, and it will stay with the woman throughout her life."

Taking action

Women also had the liquid injected into their hips and faces in the hope of making them look plumper.

One young woman, surnamed Qin, in Shenzhen had it injected into her face in 2002 at the Fu Hua Plastic Surgery Hospital in the city. She has complained of great pain when opening her mouth ever since.

Qin sued the hospital but lost. Zhang Huiqin, from Beijing, who is in her 30s, also sued the hospital in Shenzhen last year but without success.

In March 2004, plastic surgery doctors at the 12 major hospitals in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, called for their colleagues to stop using Ao Mei Ding.

Last November, hundreds of women who had the "magical liquid" injected into them wrote an open letter to the SFDA, pleading for a ban on it.

In January this year, the pharmaceutical monitoring centre of the SFDA publicized a report, which included 183 cases of side effects of the liquid from 2002 to November 2005 and finally led to the ban.

Chen, the plastic surgeon, said: "Those who were injected with the liquid should see a doctor even if they have not found anything wrong with themselves."

(China Daily May 18, 2006)