PUTRAJAYA: The government is mulling the possibility over the possibility of implementing new regulations to tackle illegal plastic surgery performed by non-accredited medical centres.

Health Minister S Subramaniam said a Cosmetic Act was needed to control all activities, including the illegal use of medical devices from becoming widespread and posing negative effects to all parties.

He said the act was still in the early stages of review, in order to ensure all matters involving medical devices were inserted, so that action or penalties could be imposed on the related parties.

“Currently all medical devices that are used to treat patients must be registered under the Medical Devices Act 2012 (Act 737). However, the laser light used by beauty centres need not be registered.

There are also beauty centres using medical devices not permitted nor registered under the Medical
Devices Act. Therefore, we need new regulations to control this problem,” he said after a working visit to the National Cancer Institute here.

Subramaniam was commenting on newspaper reports regarding requests from the Malaysian Medical Association on the enforcement of Act 737 to curb the use of medical devices such as needles and laser treatment machines widely used at non-accredited beauty centres.

According to him, the Medical Device Act 2012 was gazetted on February 9, 2012 and came into force on June 30, 2013, in which all medical device producers were required to register their products to maintain the quality standards in the country.

Source:BERNAMA