The Slim 10 diet-pill scandal that nearly killed actress Andrea De Cruz stands as Singapore's most infamous celebrity product-safety case, and as the episode that exposed how thin the regulation of health supplements was across Asia. In 2002, De Cruz suffered liver failure after taking the Chinese-made pills; her then-boyfriend, actor Pierre Png, saved her life by donating part of his liver in an emergency transplant. She went on to win S$900,000 in damages in a landmark case that laid bare the dangers lurking in products sold as traditional remedies.
The pills were manufactured in Guangdong by Yuzhitang Health Products and imported by Health Biz Pte Ltd, which listed them as a Chinese proprietary medicine and marketed them as weight-loss supplements. They were launched in Singapore in late 2001 with a publicity campaign fronted by actress Chen Liping, and retail distributor TV Media sold more than 16,000 bottles through NTUC Healthcare Pharmacy, Watsons and Guardian in just a few months. The first batch had been tested by the Health Sciences Authority before approval, which made the later discovery devastating: government tests showed the pills had been adulterated with fenfluramine, a controlled substance under the Poisons Act associated with heart-valve and thyroid problems.
De Cruz was the most famous victim, but not the only one. At least 13 other women fell ill after taking Slim 10, and logistics manager Selvarani Raja died of liver failure. In October 2003, the High Court awarded De Cruz about S$900,000, she had sought S$1.4 million, ruling that Slim 10 was the most probable cause of her condition and finding the importer Semon Liu, Health Biz and TV Media liable. Health Biz had already been fined S$45,000 for breaching its licence.
The scandal reverberated far beyond one courtroom. Singapore banned the import and sale of Slim 10 and tightened the rules for importing and selling medicines from China, while the case was cited across the region as evidence that supplement regulation was dangerously lax. For De Cruz and Pierre Png, who later married, the ordeal became the defining chapter of their public lives: a story of corporate negligence, a boyfriend's extraordinary sacrifice, and a legal victory that forced an entire industry to face scrutiny it had long avoided.
The case also fuelled a wider public-health conversation about the slimming-pill industry that endures to this day. Doctors warned that quick-fix products could cause side effects ranging from dry mouth, heart palpitations, dehydration and diarrhoea to, in the most severe cases, liver failure, and paediatric specialists said hospitals did not encourage slimming pills for children or teenagers. The Slim 10 saga became the reference point every doctor, regulator and journalist reached for whenever a new miracle weight-loss product appeared on the market: the brand that had been tested, approved, stocked by household-name pharmacies and endorsed by a celebrity campaign, and that still nearly killed its most famous customer. More than two decades on, the name Slim 10 remains shorthand in Singapore for the moment the country learned that a reassuring label and a pharmacy shelf were no guarantee of safety.