Balloons, Scooters Cited Among Hazardous Toys
With parents poised to begin snapping up Christmas toys, a public-interest research group warned Tuesday that many playthings--from scooters to tiny toy animals--can be hazardous to children.
While items such as balloons and puzzles with small pieces may look harmless, they can cause serious injury or death in the hands of small children, who may choke on them, the California Public Interest Research Group warned.
“Last year at least nine children choked to death on toys,” said spokeswoman Jessica Nusbaum, who displayed a sampling of potentially hazardous toys during the group’s presentation in Orange.
CalPIRG said its 15th annual survey revealed that toy-related injuries prompted 152,600 emergency-room visits last year. It also warned that some toys are marketed for children who are too young to use them safely, such as balloons decorated with cartoon characters or the words “Baby’s First Birthday.”
Parents should exercise heightened caution when shopping on the Internet, the group said, because it is harder to determine whether Web items are safe, partly because manufacturers’ warnings aren’t obvious when viewed from a computer screen. Furthermore, due to lax regulations, recalled toys can wind up being sold on the Internet, the group said.
“Anybody can go start a Web site,” Nusbaum said.
CalPIRG is one of a number of groups that put out lists around the holidays warning parents about unsafe toys. Those lists have proved useful for the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, which this year has recalled 29 types of toys, or 41 million items, spokesman Russ Rader said.
“We always look at those lists,” he said. “We find them helpful because these groups act as an extra set of eyes out in the marketplace.”
Overall, however, toys are becoming increasingly safe, due partly to stringent safety standards in the United States, he said.
“Most manufacturers do an excellent job of adhering to those standards,” he said. “In fact, it is increasingly difficult for us to find hazardous toys.”
Recalled toys that remain in toy boxes at home pose the biggest danger to youngsters, Rader said.
“Before people bring new products into their homes for the holidays, they should go through our list of recalled toys and make sure they don’t have recalled toys lurking in their homes,” he said. To review that list, visit the agency’s Web site at https://www.cpsc.gov.
But CalPIRG said plenty of potentially unsafe toys remain on store shelves. The items the group displayed Tuesday at Children’s Hospital of Orange County were selected from stores throughout the county.
The red-hot scooters have created a “large health hazard,” not because they are improperly constructed but because children sometimes use them recklessly, Nusbaum said. There have been 26,000 scooter-related injuries in the past 10 months, she said.
Parents should be sure that children are properly outfitted with helmets and appropriate padding, the group said.
While agreeing with such safety measures, a spokeswoman for the Toy Manufacturers of America called CalPIRG’s methods “alarmist.”
“The extent that toy manufacturers go to for toy safety is limitless,” Terri Bartlett said. “On some toys they do more than 100 types of tests.”
When examining toy safety, CalPIRG focuses particularly on choking, which it says is the leading cause of toy-related deaths.
The group suggests that parents use a toilet-paper cylinder to measure a toy’s diameter to determine whether it is too small for very young children. Toys that can fit through the tube should not be used at all by children 3 and younger, CalPIRG said.
Even plastic baby books weren’t spared during the group’s presentation. CalPIRG maintains that some of these playthings, and other plastic toys, contain chemicals called phthalates that have been linked to problems such as liver and kidney damage.
But the Consumer Product Safety Commission did not find that such a danger exists when it conducted an extensive study of plastic toys and baby products containing phthalates in 1998, Rader said.
The phthalates emitted from those products “when a baby mouths them don’t come close to being at a level that would be hazardous,” he said. More studies are being conducted, he added.
For more information, consumers can visit the Web sites of CalPIRG-- https://www.toysafety.net--and the toy manufacturers’ group--https://www.toy-tma.org.
