Are Products in Malaysia Safe that No recall Notices Issued?

We have come to the end of the first quarter of 2017 and it has been relatively quiet with regards to product safety here in Malaysia. The media industry have a saying “no news is good news”. Quite the contrary, the European Union has issued 188 recall notices since January 1st 2017,  in the children, toy, electrical appliances and household chemical product categories alone. Toy recalls account for 67% of all these recalls. Slightly over 90% of all these recalls area categorized as serious risk. Glue containing higher than allowed chloroform, pacifiers with holder chain posing strangulation risk to babies and toddlers, electrical bread-maker posing fire risks, toys posing risk associated with high levels of phthalates (hormone disruptor) and chargers without double insulation are among the products recalled from the EU market. To date the EU rapex (European Union Rapid Alert System) had recorded 450 recall notices across all general consumer product categories (excluding food, drugs, medical devices and vehicles).

Quite often the Malaysian Association of Standards Users (Standards Users) has highlighted the matter to the relevant authorities and often we do not hear back from them of them the safety status of these kinds or similar product in Malaysia.

Among the minimum roles of consumer protection authorities according to the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection (UNGCP) are:

“Appropriate policies to ensure that if manufacturers or distributors become aware of unforeseen hazards after products are placed on the market, they should notify the relevant authorities and, as appropriate, the public without delay. Member States should also consider ways of ensuring that consumers are properly informed of such hazards…. AND that policies are in place to recall it and replace or modify it, or substitute another product for it. If it is not possible to do this within a reasonable period of time, the consumer should be adequately compensated”.

The Ministry of Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism is essentially charged with safety of general consumer products. However there are limited efforts taken to safeguard consumers from unsafe products. The mystandard website has recall notices up to October of 2016 (despite being recently updated). Several shortcomings with the effectiveness of the MC labeling was highlighted but the recent revision to the product safety and toy safety regulations did not take into account improvements to the labeling scheme.

mystandard website as of 29 March 2017

In Malaysia due to limited holistic approach to product safety there are just too many regulators from different ministries for one product category. Consumers are often grappling for answers from social media and entertain fake news which has grown from a mere irritant, to a problem and now an industry. Multinationals assign personnel or department to counter fake news whilst smaller companies cannot. News like parasite in drinking water, human remains in pet food and HIV blood in canned food still make their round on social media.

Testing facilities in Malaysia are not equipped to carry out comparative testing at the scale run by organisations like WHICH? in the UK and CHOICE in Australia. Cost of testing in Malaysia has also increased. The Malaysian Association of Standards Users has spent RM several hundreds of thousands since 2008 on consumer product testing. We have tested toys, food, cosmetics, instant noodles, sauces, bottled water and tableware. We also conducted reviews of child care products and toothpastes. All tests were conducted at accredited laboratories in Malaysia. These test reports have been distributed to the relevant agencies. In some cases we have seen improvements in the regulations and in others none.

Standards Users strongly recommends that all the agencies with consumer protection roles apply best practices in product safety management and recalls (or corrective action) and better manage responses and communication with consumers on issues related to product safety – demystifying scandals, myths and fake news!

Large scale recalls such as the airbag problem should have provided valuable lessons to the relevant agencies to improve recalls and product safety management. We hope to see the improvements immediately than later.