Here's another excellent article on this issue.
Elizabeth O'Brien

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Neltner" <neltner@...>
To: <leadnet@...>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 12:38 PM
Subject: [Leadnet] Bid to Root Out Lead Trinkets Falters in U.S.


August 6, 2007

Bid to Root Out Lead Trinkets Falters in U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/business/06toys.html?pagewanted=2
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/business/06toys.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
> &_r=1&hp



By ERIC LIPTON and LOUISE STORY



WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - Despite a two-year effort to eliminate the threat of
poisonous lead in inexpensive children's jewelry, hundreds of thousands of
tainted items are still being sold across the United States, the federal
government has found.



Inspections by the Consumer Product Safety Commission of 85 pieces of
jewelry collected since last fall from retailers and importers determined
that 20 percent still posed a potential poisoning hazard.

Separate surveys by health officials or lead experts in Ohio, Massachusetts
and Maryland found even higher percentages.



The unannounced federal inspections also left no doubt about the primary
source of the threat: of the 17.9 million pieces of jewelry items pulled
from the market since the start of 2005, 95 percent were made in China.



Numerous hazardous products imported from China - including toxic
ingredients put into dog food, tainted toothpaste, faulty tires and toys
coated in lead paint - have been recalled. But the problem with the
children's jewelry, persisting after two years, reveals just how difficult
it may be to resolve such problems.



Federal officials said that they have made progress in curtailing the lead
threat in children's jewelry, but that they need more enforcement powers,
like the ability to impose fines or even criminal charges against repeat
offenders. Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the consumer safety commission,
said, "We want to get to a point of not having to do recall after recall,
and simply make the marketplace safe."



The hazardous jewelry has been brought onto the market by big-name companies
like Mattel, Juicy Couture and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment,
which included 746,621 lead-contaminated "bonus charms"

in a Shirley Temple movie package. But scores of small importers like Really
Useful Products, a company with six employees based in Darien, Ill., also
delivered children's jewelry to national retailers with dangerous levels of
lead.



Internal company and government documents released to The New York Times
last week by the federal consumer protection agency, in response to a
Freedom of Information Act request, detail the recent crackdown, offering an
inside look at how gaps in vigilance by importers in the United States
allowed these contaminated low-price products to hit the market.



The importers, in the commission's documents, often assert that their
contracts prohibit jewelry with elevated levels of lead. But by failing to
test a large enough sample of the delivered goods - not just at the start of
production, but regularly as new batches are produced - these companies
still ended up selling hazardous products, the documents show.



Jewelry is perhaps the most dangerous place for lead because children can
swallow an entire ring or pendant, causing acute poisoning, which can cause
respiratory failure, seizures and even death, whereas neurological damage
and learning deficiencies are often associated with exposure to lead paint.
Many children also tend to suck on jewelry or put it in their mouths,
allowing lead to be absorbed into their bloodstream.



From 2000 to 2005, about 20,000 children turned up in emergency rooms after
ingesting jewelry, according to a hospital surveillance program by the
agency, though it is not know how many of those cases involved lead. These
cheap products, made of lead because it is an inexpensive metal filler, also
easily fall apart, making it even easier for a child to swallow a small
part.



That is just what happened in 2003, when doctors in Oregon found a lead
medallion that had been purchased from vending machine in the stomach of a
young boy who had complained of abdominal cramps and diarrhea.



And last year, Jarnell Brown, a 4-year-old in Minneapolis, swallowed a
heart-shaped charm that had been given away by Reebok International as a
sales incentive on its children's footwear. Jarnell died after suffering
vomiting, seizures and respiratory arrest. During the autopsy, a charm
imprinted with the Reebok logo was removed from his stomach.



"It's just outrageous," said Lisa Smestad, a environmental health official
in Minneapolis who investigated the boy's death. "How can we be allowing
products that are targeted and marketed to children that have such a
potential to poison them?"



Children's advocates say that neither the federal government nor the private
sector has done enough to ensure that jewelry entering the market is not
contaminated with lead. Far broader federal tests are necessary, they say,
backed up by stiff penalties and even criminal charges if companies, seeking
to maximize profits by buying from the lowest-cost suppliers, continue to
import contaminated children's jewelry.



"If a company is gong to put their label on it, they need to be able to
guarantee these products are not going to cause harm to consumers,"

said Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety for the Consumer
Federation of America. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been
trying to crack down on lead jewelry since February 2005, when it announced
that any children's jewelry that had more than .06 percent lead by weight -
and that was accessible to a child who might suck on the item or simply
touch it - would be considered a hazard, and subject to recall.



After several high-profile recalls in 2006 as many products on the market
failed to meet this standard the commission last fall began to send a team
of investigators out to companies that import or sell children's jewelry.



Inspectors collected and tested samples - finding lead problems one out of
five times, confirming the similar recent surveys by health officials and
children's advocates in Massachusetts, Maryland and Ohio, which found lead
contamination in children's jewelry as often as 40 percent of the time.
Based on these tests, one federal official said it was fair to estimate that
the number of contaminated children's jewelry items on the market remains in
the hundreds of thousands.



This federal enforcement effort has been driving, in part, the recent surge
in recalls this year of lead jewelry. Indeed, jewelry made up three-quarters
of all lead-related recalls of children's products in the last three years.



On Jan. 11, for example, an inspector arrived unannounced at the
Cockeysville, Md., headquarters of A&A Global Industries, a supplier of
rub-on tattoos, stickers, rings, necklaces and other knick-knacks stored in
plastic eggs in vending machines nationwide at stores like Wal-Mart, Toys
"R" Us, Safeway and Kmart.



Since a 2004 recall of lead-tainted jewelry it had sold, A&A hired a new
independent testing company to monitor its imports, reduced the number of
jewelry styles in its stock and set its standard at .04 percent lead by
weight, lower than the commission's standard, company documents show.



Nonetheless, the spot check in March found that A&A's Groovy Grab bracelets
contained lead at a level more than 100 times above the limit, leading to an
April recall of 4 million bracelets sold over the previous 16 months,
featuring designs like smiley faces, flames and Chinese symbols.



Executives at A&A did not return calls seeking comment. But in statements to
the federal investigators, Brian S. Kovens, the executive vice president,
said that he rejected any vendors that failed its initial lead tests and
performed spot checks on certain pieces of jewelry before they were shipped.
But ensuring that the jewelry is consistently lead safe is generally left up
to the Chinese vendors.



Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, a division of the News
Corporation, offered a free DVD to people who returned silver-coated metal
charms that contained lead in the spring of 2006.



But many of the charms may still sit on children's dressers. Fifteen months
after Fox's recall of the 746,621 charms, only about 50,000 - or

6.7 percent - of the charms were sent back, according to a Fox spokesman..



"We wanted them all back, we did everything we could do to get them back,"
said Steven Feldstein, a Fox spokesman, adding that many of the charms were
probably thrown away.



The Fox charms were imported by Corporate Images of Newbury Park, Calif.,
and manufactured at a factory called ChengXing Hardware Ornament Factory in
DongGuang, China. Mr. Feldstein of Fox said he thought Fox had stopped
working with Corporate Images. But Corporate Images lists Fox as a client on
its Web site. Corporate Images, its site promises, offers "cost-saving
efforts that are truly remarkable."



Prodded by the Sierra Club, an environmental group that has focused on
combating lead hazards, the product safety commission is now considering a
formal ban on lead in children's jewelry, instead of simply setting an
enforcement standard.



Dozens of letters have been sent to the commission urging it to adopt this
ban immediately.



Among the 195 pages of comments submitted this year about the proposed ban,
only one speaks in firm opposition: a March 2007 letter from the government
of China.



Jewelry with lead is not a danger, Guo LiSheng, a deputy director general at
China's General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and
Quarantine, wrote in a March letter to the commission, as long as it is
covered by a protective coating.



The regulation, he argued, was unnecessary and would "increase the cost of
producing and inspection of the manufacturers of children's metal jewelry,
and bring unnecessary obstacles to trade."



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