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US lawmaker warns of scary lead levels in Halloween items
Washington (AFP) Oct 4, 2007 Just weeks before children take to the streets October 31 to collect Halloween treats, a US lawmaker warned Thursday that some of the buckets they will put them into contain scarily high levels of lead. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio commissioned the head of a university chemistry department to test 22 Halloween items for lead. Three of those items -- a Frankenstein cup and two buckets for sweets -- were found to have lead levels up to 650 times above the upper limit for lead in children's items allowed by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Brown said in a statement posted on his website. The highest level of lead was found in the Frankenstein cup, which the test showed to contain 39,000 parts per million (ppm) of the potentially toxic metal. A witch bucket contained 21,000 ppm and a skull bucket contained 2,700 ppm, according to the results posted on the senator's website. The level above which lead poses a danger to children is 600 ppm, according to the CPSC's website. Brown has written to the consumer safety board to express concern over the findings. "China makes nearly 80 percent of the toys that are imported into the United States, yet adequate safety measures have not been taken to assure that toys produced in China do not contain lead paint," Brown said in his letter. The results of the test on Halloween items were "troubling", he said, and urged the CPSC to "address the problem". A spokeswoman for the CPSC said the product safety body would deal with the issue raised by Brown "expeditiously" -- but only after the agency has carried out its own tests on the articles. "We welcome information about product safety but we have to follow up and conduct our own inquiries before we take action," CPSC spokeswoman Patty Davis told AFP. She added: "Seasonal products are addressed expeditiously." The CPSC does "on average 500 recalls a year," Davis said, adding that there "has been an uptick in recalls involving lead paint." Concern over Chinese-made toys -- some with lead paint, some with other safety defects -- have led to recalls numbering in millions of items, affecting popular US brands including Barbie dolls, and marquee companies and retailers such as Mattel, Fisher Price, and Toys "R" US. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links Our Polluted World and Cleaning It Up
China struggling to tackle rising pollution
Beijing (AFP) Sept 24, 2007China is finding it increasingly difficult to cope with rising pollution and its impact on the environment despite record investment in clean technology, state media reported Monday. |
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