Tainted Shipment Stirs County Official to Call for a Ban on Dolls From Taiwan

Taiwanese-made dolls should be banned from Los Angeles County, officials said Tuesday after at least 8,000 dolls were found to contain stuffing contaminated with toxic pesticides that smell of kerosene.

“We want the importers involved,” said Anastacio Medina, chief of the hazardous waste control program of the county Department of Health Services.

“When you affect their pocket money, they take notice,” he said. “We feel it’s an injustice to make these dolls, because they use the cheapest materials possible and give them to unsuspecting children.”

Information Gathered

Medina said he will ask the Board of Supervisors to prohibit any import of dolls from Taiwan “until they get their act together.”

This is the second consecutive Christmas season in which contaminated dolls from Taiwan have been discovered.

Chen Lee, secretary of the Los Angeles office of the Republic of China Coordinating Council for North American Affairs, said Tuesday that the council’s commercial division was gathering information about the tainted dolls.

“They will refer this to our trade authorities (in Taiwan) for further investigation,” Lee said. “The government tries to eliminate this kind of thing and improve the quality of the businessmen’s products.”

Joe Korbus, head of Occupational Health and Radiation Management in the health department, said:

“I think that the problem has to be resolved somewhere and I think we have to address it through whatever means we have politically. If we have to chase these dolls down every year, we’ll have to take a more direct approach to the problem.”

Sold at Swap Meets

Last year, about two weeks before Christmas, tainted dolls from Taiwan started appearing for sale at swap meets, but the number and the manufacturer of those dolls remain unknown, Medina said.

“We really have no idea how many there were because we never went full blast to try to retrieve each and every one,” he said, adding that the Sheriff’s Department recovered 600 to 700.

This year, 8,000 tainted dolls were imported into the United States from Taiwan 13 months ago and kept in a storage container by Stevedoring Services of America in Long Beach. The unidentified importer went bankrupt and when he requested the storage container be returned, Stevedoring Services donated the contents to various hospitals and other institutions. Health officials managed to account for all but 100 of the dolls, Medina said.

The bill of lading indicated 11,000 dolls were imported, but many remain in a warehouse, and officials plan to count those this week to determine how many are missing, he said.

Manufacturer Unknown

The dolls--a 24-inch model called “Little Prince” and a 16-inch model called “Outer Space Orphans”--look entirely different from last year’s dolls, and again officials do not know the identity of the manufacturer, Medina said.

“Last year’s dolls came from Taiwan, but we could not locate a single source of the dolls,” he said.

The exporter of this year’s dolls is Say-Hi Enterprises Corp. of Kelung Road in Taipei, he said.

Tests showed that the dolls had a residue of toxic pesticides--including lindane, heptachlor and phenol. The chemicals could cause respiratory, nerve and skin damage, said Jose Ochoa, a hygienist in the county health department.

There have been no reported injuries, said county spokesman LaVerne Vosburg.