Expert Health Bloggers, Barack Obama and Cookie Monster are uniting to keep children safe from lead poisoning

Leading toy-maker Mattel has just announced a humiliating recall of children’s toys due to another lead paint scare involving an outsourced Chinese contractor. The poisonous toys are limited to a single run of products put together between April 19 and July 6 of this year. The toys retail from 5-40 dollars and have been available in stores across America for several weeks now. The toys involved in the recall include some extremely well-known Disney and Fisher-Price characters such as Elmo, Dora the Explorer, Cookie Monster and Big Bird.

A number of expert health blogs have been chronicling the lengthy list of children’s toys recalled over lead paint. Parent Dish has been keeping tabs on anything related to faulty children’s toys and they offered some very interesting commentary on this latest recall scare. Their latest post saw the current retail environment as a leading contributor in the rise of unsafe children’s toys. “I think that we, in the United States, have become so used to and so demanding of relatively cheap toys (and other goods) that companies are cutting corners wherever they can to get the prices down to almost nothing.”

The rise of globalization and outsourcing has opened America up to lax manufacturing standards from overseas countries, China in particular. The Parent Dish blog was adamant that domestically-made toys should be favoured by discerning parents. “I certainly don't want to shift even one iota of blame from the companies that made the toys using lead-based paint, but I do think we could avoid this sort of thing if we bought toys made more locally by companies who were not necessarily the lowest bidder.”

Parent Dish wasn’t the only expert health blog up in arms over this potential disaster. Dr Gwenn’s Pediatrics Now blog has a post titled “Don’t touch that Dora” that offers a medical professional’s perspective on this recall. She indicated that younger children are especially vulnerable, “the risk comes when they ingest the lead paint. So, it's the small kids who put the toys in their mouths or who crawl on the floor near the toys where some paint may have chipped off.”

Anybody whose children actually own one of these toys are advised to do the following, “clean your floors well to remove any dust from the toy that may have rubbed off the toy, and call your pediatrician.”

The concerns over dangerous Chinese goods have been growing in recent years and it is becoming a significant political issue- one that many Americans want addressed in the next election.  Barack Obama has jumped on this as a campaign issue by introducing the Lead Free Toys Act of 2007.

A post from Blogging Baby was quick to agree with Obama’s political manoeuvring “lead is highly toxic and can lead to serious health problems for children. Everybody knows this. Lead paint was banned in 1977 for that very reason.”

Obama, himself the father of two young daughters, believed that tougher government legislation was necessary because corporations can’t be trusted to police themselves. His statement on the Lead Free Toys Act of 2007 included the following comment, “When it comes to protecting our children from lead, there should be no disparities. We can no longer rely on recalls to keep dangerous products out of the hands of our children – that's playing with fire. We must eliminate any risk by taking preventative action and banning the production and sale of products that contain lead.”

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