The consequences can be heavy. Botox injections outside the medical framework, often promoted on social networks, are illegal and can have serious health effects, alerts the drug agency on Thursday after hospitalization of eight women with serious botulism symptoms.
These heavy symptoms were observed in people who had to be admitted to resuscitation in the Paris region between August and September 2024: “Difficulty speaking or swallowing, difficulty walking, bordering or double vision, respiratory difficulties that may require tracheotomy,” details the ANSM in a press release.
Botulism is a severe neurological disease whose symptoms appeared 24 to 48 hours after “aesthetic purposes, not qualified”, Botox, an injectable product used in aesthetic medicine to temporarily improve the appearance of wrinkles.
A cluster
These cases required “immediate hospitalization in resuscitation: for some of these women, we were in situations to put into play the vital forecast,” Mehdi Benkebil, director of monitoring of the drug agency, told AFP.
In recent years, sporadic cases had been observed, “but here we can talk about a group, an exceptional situation,” he tells all hospitalized women injected, “on the face and the eye contour”, in the same center of the Paris region, with adverse effects mainly linked to “overdose.”
It is also used to treat certain muscle or neurological disorders, Botox or Botulinic toxin is a drug that “only doctors specialized in plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery, dermatology, face and neck surgery, maxillofacial surgery and ophthalmology can buy and administer,” recalls the ANSM.
A supplier of illegality
Any “aesthetic supplier” that manages its customers “is illegal and endangers the health of its customers,” adds the drug agency, which seized the public prosecutor in September 2024. The center was closed, Mehdi Benkebil said.
Therefore, the ANSM calls “the greatest surveillance against dangerous practices that can be subject to a promotion through social networks and constitute an illegal exercise of medicine.”
If in 2021 the ANSM had warned professionals against the use of injectable products for counterfeit aesthetic purposes, whose poor quality could cause undesirable effects, this time the products used, bought abroad on the Internet, do not seem to have been of poor quality, he said. Even if in several cases “they could not be identified,” specifies the ANSM manager.
Made in poor hygiene conditions that can cause infections, these dangerous injections for patients, often young, are marketed on social networks, Instagram and Tiktok in mind, by pseudomedales or promoted by influencers.
Depending on the order of doctors, illegal medical and surgical acts for Cosmers are experiencing a disturbing growth in France. In 2024, the number of reports reached a record of 128, against 123 in 2023 and 62 in 2022.
In mid -September 2023, two very active sisters on social networks had been sentenced to Valenciennes (north) in prison and suspended by hundreds of illegal botox injections and hyaluronic acid.
Source: BFM TV
