History of the Australian Breast Device Registry

Following the Dow Corning crisis in the 1990s, several national breast implant registries were formed by plastic surgery societies around the world. The Australian Breast Implant Registry (BIR) was developed in 1997 as a voluntary registry where patients were charged a moiety per implant. At the time of the Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) crisis in 2010, there were over 30,000 registrations in the BIR. However, when the dataset was interrogated to retrieve PIP implant-related information, only 3.4 per cent of 13,000 PIP implants were recorded in the BIR database.