"Carlos Uebel, MD, PhD, had just begun his 2-year term as the president of the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery in early 2012 when the PIP breast implant scandal rocked Europe and Latin America.
An estimated 300,000 women in 65 countries received the tainted Poly Implant Prosthèse (PIP) implants, including 14,000 in Brazil. “PIP implants were filled with industrial silicone, of poor quality, and dangerous for patient health. They were rupturing and causing swelling in the lymph nodes,” recalls Uebel, a plastic surgeon from Porto Alegre, South Brazil. “It was terrible. This was the biggest plastic surgery disaster in the silicone protheses history of Europe and South America.”
The scandal and its far-reaching implications exposed many holes in a system that was supposed to protect patients. The fallout, which continues today, has sired some important changes across the globe, including the implementation of a National Implant Registry in many countries like the UK and Brazil that would allow faulty material and procedures to be easily traced if something of this magnitude were ever to occur again. “We now have rules to prevent something like this from happening,” Uebel says."