This is a guest post by Ann W. Hopefully she will become a regular contributor to Not China Made! Ann is a Christian, a grandma, and lives in the Pacific North West.
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In the September 2007 issue of Good Housekeeping has an article called, “Playing
with Poison” by Virginia Sole-Smith. It begins with a heart wrenching story of a
little boy who ingested a piece of trinket jewelry from a 25 cent vending machine. The boy soon after displayed aggressive symptoms, then illness, and subsequently died as a result of lead poisoning.

The article is several pages long and I would encourage everyone to read it.
This is the last portion of the article that outraged me and I’m sure, will
outrage you.

“There are no mandatory federal regulations to prevent lead-laced children’s
products from hitting shelves (unless they have lead paint on them, in which
case they’re regulated under the lead-in-paint law). But some state and local
legislators are taking action This month, for example, regulations in
California, Minnesota, and Baltimore will ban children’s jewelry that contains
more than the recommended standard, 600 ppm.

While these efforts may force chains to meet stricter standards, many experts say we still need federal legislation to really make them clean up their acts.
Senator Barack Obama (D-Il) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Ca) agree; in Nov 2005, they introduced the Lead Free Toys Act, which would require the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) to ban children’s products with more than
trace amounts of lead. Though that bill is still in Congress (Sen. Obama
reintroduced it in May 2007), the CPSC took a separate step last December,
voting to begin a rule-making process that could prompt a ban on kids’ metal
jewelry made with more than 600 ppm lead. But that’s not nearly as restrictive and Sen. Obama’s proposed law. And changing CPSC rules is “a multi-stage process that will take time,” says Julie Vallese, director of information and public affairs.

Meanwhile, some advocacy groups are getting impatient. Over the last three years, the Center for Environmental Health (CEH), a non-profit public and
environmental health advocacy group in Oakland, CA, has tested more than 200
lunch boxes and found that 10-20 percent of them exceeded the government’s
standard of 600 ppm - in some cases by 90 times. When the CEH released its findings in 2005, the CPSC said that its own testing showed no such risk. “But when we acquired the CPSC’s data, we found that some lunch boxes they tested had lead levels 16 times the standard”, says Alexa Engleman, formerly CEH’s public interest litigation coordinator.

The CPSC disputes CEH’s claims. Regarding the lunch boxes, Vallese says, “we’ve
determined that the accessible lead levels from a lunch box are negligible based
on how consumers interact with the product.” She means kids are less likely to
put their mouths on a box than they are to swallow a piece of jewelry. But the
CPSC doesn’t investigate whether lead can leak from a vinyl lining onto, say,
an apple packed inside. “The apple is not under our jurisdiction,” Vallese
says. That buck passes to the Food and Drug Administration, which issued a
letter to manufacturers in July 2006 urging them “to refrain from marketing
such lead-containing lunch boxes.”…(all emphasis added)

Why can’t the politicians and these agencies just make it simple by not
allowing ANY lead in consumer products in America? I suspect they will not until we all DEMAND it.
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