1 in 5 shot of lethally poisoning your child

Filed in archive Int'l Development by Miche on August 10, 2007

Despite efforts to decrease lead in children's toys and jewelry, "recent surveys by health officials and children's advocates in Massachusetts, Maryland and Ohio, [...] found lead contamination in children's jewelry as often as 40 percent of the time" according to a New York Times article.

A nationwide government survey found an overall one in five occurrence of dangerous lead levels in children's jewelry.

Culprits include those egg packaged trinkets in vending machines from places like Wal-Mart, k mart, Toys R Us. Also included are bonus trinkets from marketing incentive programs.

Basically - anything small, obviously cheap, and just the right size for a kid to swallow.

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.

By the way, those are classic symptoms of lead poisoning. Why is this happening? Well, apparently current laws only allow for recalls, and don't give officials the ability to charge fines or otherwise discourage repeat offenders. Additionally, importers and manufacturers aren't exactly being very diligent.

Related Entries:

How did Beethoven die? - 08 December 2005
Poison pills become sweeter - 28 July 2006
Lead and Children's Jewelry - 13 December 2006
US and China Should Lead Global Pollution Solutions - 30 April 2007

« Lawsuit filed against che... | Main | A new biofuel for develop... »

Permalink: 1 in 5 shot of lethally poisoning your child

Tags: children poison lead importing China social social+enterprise lethally+poisoning

Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/84939

Addthis

Ask

Blinklist

del.icio.us

Digg

Fark

Facebook

Google

Lycos

Ma.gnolia

Mr Wong

Netscape

Netvousz

Newsvine

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Tailrank

Technorati

Wink

Yahoo

Vote for 1 in 5 shot of lethally poisoning your child:

Currently 9.00/10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Rating: 9.00 out of 2 vote(s) cast.

Add your response to 1 in 5 shot of lethally poisoning your child:

Name: *

Email: (will never be shown)*

URL:

(* marked fields are required)

Notify me if more comments appear?

Subscribe to Audeamus - How dare we... newsletter? (Newsletters are sent out weekly).

Remember me

Security Code: *
(Please help us to sort out spam.)

Please enter your comment here: (Sorry, no HTML is allowed - URLs will be made clickable automatically if you add http:// to your URL.)

We welcome your comments, however all comments are moderated. Offensive or off-topic comments will be deleted and not displayed.

Share It

Use the search to look for other interesting posts

Contributors (Last 90 days)

Gautam Chhabra (11)
Creative Weblogging (3)

This site has 427 entries and is powered by Creative Weblogging since April 2006.

Our Editors recommend

Disclaimer

Some of the contents of this site are protected Creative Weblogging Inc. 2004-2010.

Check out our Sponsored Blogs!

Business Computer Blog (UK)

Are you interested in writing a blog in our network?

See which positions are currently open.

Testimonials

From Echoing Green: Our Top Seven Social Entrepreneurship Blogs
Audeamus
www.audeamus.com
A one stop shop for everything about social responsibility and entrepreneurship, Audeamus has it all. The posts are split up between categories like Books and Tools, Go Green, and Social Enterprise, which makes it very easy to find exactly what you want.