Women line up to switch breast implants

CARACAS, Venezuela -- The office of plastic surgeon Ignacio Sousa is so packed that women are lined up outside the door. College students in their 20s, housewives in their 40s, middle-class office workers: nearly all are fearful that their breast implants may be leaking.

Thousands of women worldwide are consulting their doctors about health concerns that have sprung up since December due to faulty silicone implants made by the now-defunct French company Poly Implant Prothese, or PIP. In some cases, the implants filled with industrial-grade silicone have split open.

"It's like a snowball," said Sousa, who has been receiving dozens of patients every day since the news broke that French authorities recommended the implants be removed.

The scandal has hit beauty-obsessed Venezuela particularly hard. An estimated 16,000 Venezuelans have the implants, one of the highest figures in Latin America, along with much-larger Brazil, where about 20,000 women have PIP-made implants.

Like many of those affected in Venezuela, Sania Arroyo, 33, has struggled with the mounting medical bills. The bank employee and single mother managed to save about 20,000 bolívars, or $4,600, for surgery to replace the implants in January, scraping together nearly four times what she paid to have them inserted in 2007.

She felt a tingling pain under her left breast, and an ultrasound exam confirmed one implant had ruptured and was leaking silicone into her body. She said the replacement implants feel more comfortable, but she's still apprehensive about them.

Arroyo is one of 495 Venezuelans who are suing companies that sold the implants, demanding payment of medical costs.

Venezuela's government offered to remove the implants for free, but many women won't take up the offer because they prefer to have new implants and the government won't pay for them.