Safety Alarm Bells in Other Countries Not Always Heard in U.S.
The United States is generally acknowledged to have one of the most aggressive records on consumer safety in the world, but it doesn’t always live up to that reputation.
Occasionally, products barred from the market in other countries because of safety concerns remain available in the United States, purchased by blissfully uninformed Americans.
Consumer groups say the inconsistencies--in merchandise as disparate as tires, medicine and dietary supplements--point up the need for better communication among nations about potential dangers to the buying public.
At a time when goods from one manufacturer are sold on many continents, the first warnings of possible trouble occasionally sound overseas without reverberating here.
Firestone tires provide only the most recent example of the problem. Over the past year, Ford Motor Co. replaced Firestone tires on its popular Explorer model in the Persian Gulf, North Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. The foreign recall was only recently disclosed in this country as Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. recalled 6.5 million similar U.S. tires that are linked to scores of deaths.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said Sunday he thinks Congress should require manufacturers to immediately notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of recalls in other countries, “especially in this global economy.”
In recent years, other products have remained on sale in the U.S. while they were prohibited elsewhere:
* Rezulin, a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes, was withdrawn in England in late 1997; the medicine was sold in the United States for more than two years before the Food and Drug Administration banned it in March. By that time, 63 voluntarily reported cases of fatal liver failure were tied to the medicine.
* In Japan, after a few children died from reactions to the whooping-cough component of the familiar DPT vaccine (the “P” stands for pertussis), officials there replaced it in 1981 with DPaT, which uses only parts of the pertussis-causing bacteria. The FDA followed suit here--14 years later.
* Health concerns led Denmark to ban ephedra, the active ingredient in a nutritional supplement still available over the counter here. And DHEA, another supplement on U.S. shelves, was prohibited for sale in Australia and for athletes’ use by the International Olympic Committee.
Certainly, there are localized reasons for company recalls or government bans that may not apply in this country: for instance, bad lots like the tainted Coca-Cola yanked from shelves in Europe last year. Still, said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, “it’s a good idea” for customers here to be aware if a product prompts worry overseas.
No Global System to Share Safety Data
The methods for finding out about danger signs abroad are often haphazard, both in the U.S. government and among consumer-protection organizations.
While air safety agencies around the world share elaborate, long-established systems alerting each other to repair and inspection orders, contacts among auto safety agencies are less formal. The NHTSA has a standing agreement to regularly share information with its Canadian counterpart, but exchanges with other overseas counterparts are more casual, usually at international conferences.
Public Citizen pores over British medical newsletters searching for drugs considered dangerous in the United Kingdom. Strategic Safety, a litigators’ research firm, found out about Ford’s Venezuela recall of Explorers through a serendipitous e-mail citing a newspaper report in that country.
“We almost need a monitoring organization at the global level,” said Jayanti Durai, senior coordinator for global trade at London-based Consumers International. “That’s one of the big up-and-coming challenges for the future.”
George Iny, president of the Automobile Protection Assn., a Canadian consumer group, agreed: “You have vehicles that are now being produced for a world market. If the collection of data had been integrated, it might have allowed a quicker response” in the Firestone case.
To Iny--as perhaps to the average customer here--the notion of looking to other countries to signal danger in the United States seems counterintuitive. “If you are talking about investigating safety defects, the greatest activity is in the U.S.,” he said.
While there are instances in which foreign governments take a tougher position on specific auto safety issues--child passenger protection in Europe, for example--even consumer groups acknowledge that American regulators at the highway safety administration are well regarded around the world.
A recent example of other countries following the lead of the U.S. on a public safety issue involved the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in January. After the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of more than 1,100 airliners for potentially defective horizontal stabilizer mechanisms, governments around the world followed suit, issuing similar orders for inspections of their aircraft.
Other Countries Sometimes Take Lead
As assertive as the United States is, however, “we have been eclipsed by other countries . . . in certain areas,” said Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director of the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest.
He gave this example: In 1991, the United States stopped testing meat for a hormone, diethylstilbestrol, banned for animals raised to be eaten because it could cause cancer in the daughters of pregnant women who consumed it. The government said it had not found any traces of the hormone, known as DES, in this country’s meat since the 1970s.
The Swiss, however, were continuing to monitor for DES, and in July 1999, they discovered residues--in samples of imported American beef, from packinghouses that also provided meat to U.S. grocery stores. The Swiss government notified the agricultural attache at the U.S. Embassy.
“Similar contamination may be present in beef consumed by Americans,” CSPI Executive Director Michael F. Jacobson wrote U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman in January. The American government recently resumed checking for DES.
Rules and practices regarding defects discovered abroad vary across the U.S. government--a contrast that has attracted the attention of congressional investigators.
Ford and Firestone did not notify the NHTSA about the recalls abroad at the time. Ford maintained it was not obligated to do so because the problems were related to specific driving conditions and habits in other countries.
By contrast, in 1997, Sweden’s BRIO Corp. immediately reported to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that a 22-month-old child in Germany choked to death on a piece of a toy wooden clown (the hat). BRIO also recalled about 79,000 of the toy clowns, which sold for approximately $19 in this country.
Product Safety Agency Has Tougher Rules
Congress empowered the product safety commission, which has jurisdiction over virtually all household goods from toys to appliances, with stricter reporting requirements than it granted to the NHTSA, which regulates auto safety.
While auto makers are only bound to notify the NHTSA when they believe they have discovered a product defect, other manufacturers must notify the product safety commission when they receive credible information that suggests there may be a problem--a far lower threshold.
If a product is sold in the U.S., it doesn’t matter where in the world the problem occurs.
“Our regulations tell companies that when in doubt, report,” said Alan Schoem, the product safety commission’s compliance director. The commission also is empowered to levy stiffer fines than the NHTSA, up to $1.6 million for a related series of incidents compared with the NHTSA’s $925,000 maximum.
In another difference, the product safety commission requires companies to report if they have three liability judgments or settlements on a product within a two-year period. NHTSA does not request lawsuit information unless it has begun investigating a specific potential defect.
Still, like the NHTSA, “we have a problem with companies who do not report to us,” said safety commission spokesman Russ Rader. Since last year, the agency has assigned several investigators to spend part of their day searching the Internet for foreign recalls and consumer complaints abroad.
Senate and House aides said strengthening the NHTSA’s reporting requirements is likely to be one of the results of the Firestone hearings.
* Times researcher Sunny Kaplan contributed to this report.
* FIRESTONE FALLOUT
Highway safety agency’s chief questions auto industry self-regulation. A1
