In the first four months of 2008, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the federal agency responsible for the safety of more than 15,000 types of consumer products, has initiated 121 recalls involving nearly 10 million unsafe products. That includes more than 5.9 million toys and other children’s products with harmful, tiny magnets; toxic lead paint; and choking and strangulation hazards. If you do the math, that’s more than 50,000 products a day. Much is at stake if we don’t fix our product safety system, especially for children.

Our goal should be fewer recalls because that would mean the products winding up on our shelves are safer. To help reach that goal, consumer and public interest groups, and concerned Americans everywhere, want Congress to finalize action on meaningful product safety reforms. Congressional conferees are now at work trying to complete action on a product safety reform measure. It’s important that they get it right and produce the strongest reforms possible.

Consider the story of one family. Twenty-month old Jack Esses ended up in a coma late last year. And when doctors were at a loss to explain what was wrong, his mom — Shelby Esses — was sure her son’s frightening state was due to the Aqua Dots beads he had swallowed earlier that day. Fortunately, six hours after falling into a coma, Jack woke up. But Shelby didn’t let the matter drop. She pursued her hunch that the Aqua Dots were the cause of her son’s sudden sickness.

Shelby had to ask the manufacturer of the Aqua Dots for the toy’s ingredients, which she submitted to the toxicology lab at her son’s hospital. The lab results showed that the toy was indeed toxic—shockingly it contained ingredients that turned into GHB, the so-called date-rape drug, when swallowed. Her information helped lead to a recall of 4.2 million sets of Aqua Dots on November 7, 2007.
In the following months, Shelby and several other parents of children who also suffered injuries from toys came to Washington to share their harrowing tales with policymakers. The families’ told stories about one child who swallowed a lead charm and had dangerously elevated lead levels in his blood, two other children who swallowed harmful toy magnets that had to be surgically removed, and one toddler who slept in a crib that partially collapsed. Their frightening experiences played a critical role in convincing Congress to enact product safety reforms.

These families are not alone in the pursuit of tougher product safety rules. Tens of thousands of concerned individuals across the country have joined in, emailing and telephoning their Congressional representatives to demand stronger toy and product-safety rules. This winter Congress passed legislation to beef up the under-funded and under-staffed Consumer Product Safety Commission to require more toy testing, and to ban lead in children’s toys and other products. While the Senate and House of Representatives each passed bipartisan bills, their differences still need to be reconciled so we end up with one powerful reform measure.

Congress should take the best of the House and Senate bills and write a final bill that gives the CPSC the money and tools it needs to get the job done right. The final bill should require third party testing of toys, remove harmful lead and other chemicals from children’s products as quickly as possible, provide a strong role for state attorneys general to enforce product safety violations, give the CPSC more authority to stop the distribution of hazardous products, and raise the penalties for those who violate the new safety law. The final bill should also include protections for employees who blow the whistle on product safety violations from being fired for speaking out to keep us safe.

Importantly, the bill should establish a consumer-friendly database at the CPSC so consumers can have timely access to complaints about product hazards. That way we could all make sound – and safer - purchasing decisions and learn about dangerous products that might already be in our homes. Had such a database been available to Shelby, she believes it might have warned her about the harmful chemical in Aqua Dots and averted her nightmare with Jack. At the very least, the database would have enabled her to warn other parents, and the CPSC, before more children had to suffer like her son did.

Let’s hope that the Shelby and Jack Esses of this country don’t have too wait much longer for Congress to do the right thing and complete action on the strongest possible product safety measure. Consumers are counting on it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Politics .