The New York Times
Friday 22 June 2007
For decades, Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow trains have been teaching children important life lessons. Now the plucky locomotives - especially the haughty and sometimes naughty James the Red Engine - are serving up important lessons about regulating environmental poisons in the global economy.
Last week, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that a toy maker, RC2 Corporation of Oak Brook, Ill., was recalling some 1.5 million Thomas & Friends wooden railway toys because their bright red or yellow coatings contain lead.
The commission routinely issues recalls of lead-tainted children's products, but usually these are trinkets - bubble-gum-machine toys, cheap imported novelties and no-brand children's jewelry - and provoke little public outcry. Thomas & Friends products are a different story: they are purchased in upscale toy stores for $10 to $70 apiece, often by politically empowered parents who are extremely averse to exposing their children to contaminants of any kind.
The Product Safety Commission has not disclosed the actual lead content in the recalled toys. But a commission spokesman said RC2's Chinese manufacturer appears to have substituted highly leaded pigments for some portion of the lead-free paint the corporation had specified.
As always happens when a new lead hazard is discovered, a spirited game of blame and counterblame has ensued: RC2 should have exercised greater control over its Chinese partners; the safety commission should have caught the problem earlier; the Bush administration should not have cut the commission's budget by 10 percent in the last two years, forcing it to reduce its force of investigators and compliance agents.
It is important to do what we can to prevent the import of dangerous toys. But it is at least as important to help our international partners curtail the use of lead and other toxic substances in their own markets. Lax product safety and environmental regulation overseas undoubtedly lowers manufacturing costs there, but it also perpetuates the risk to our children and guarantees harmful exposure to both workers and children in countries that continue using lead as blithely as we once did.
Until a few decades ago, lead-painted toys were as American as the Little Dutch Boy, the National Lead Company emblem who cheerfully extolled the virtues of pure lead paints for homes, cars, water tanks and toys. At the beginning of the 1920s, childhood lead poisoning was nearly invisible, but as doctors reported more and more pediatric fatalities, blame focused initially on the lead paint on toys and crib furniture, though some reports implicated lead-painted woodwork and windowsills (which would turn out to be the far greater threat). In 1930, the lead industry countered with a shoddily conducted "survey" of toy and crib manufacturers, most of whom denied using lead paint, or asserted their products were harmless.
Our government took them at their word. No laws were passed to regulate the amount of lead in toys. And even after 1955, when the paint industry agreed to voluntary restrictions on the amount of lead in paint for interior use in homes, American manufacturers continued to use highly leaded paints in all manner of consumer products.
It was not until the 1960s and '70s that America woke to the danger. Gradually, it became apparent that our environment was awash in lead - spewing from the tailpipes of cars burning leaded gasoline, flowing from the solid-lead pipes that carried drinking water and painted onto almost every surface.
At the same time, scientific research was beginning to discredit the old notion of a "threshold for harm" from lead. Hospitals and public health agencies had accepted the lead industry's assertion that children could sustain blood-lead levels as high as 50 to 70 micrograms per deciliter without harm. But mounting evidence of irreversible damage at far lower blood-lead levels undermined the very notion of a threshold for harm.
With lead poisoning known to be a danger to all children, the United States undertook a remarkable, if still far from complete, purging of environmental lead, resulting in a reduction in average blood-lead levels to less than two micrograms per deciliter at century's end, from almost 15 in the mid-1970s.
Consequently, researchers today can detect lead's damage even below 10 micrograms per deciliter (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "level of concern" for children). And they have seen that a rise in blood lead at this low level is associated with a greater decrease in I.Q. than a same-sized increase above 10 micrograms per deciliter. So, while getting rid of those last 10 micrograms may be expensive (and may entail removing James the Red Engine from Junior's clenched fist), it is an investment worth making.
It is also a project we cannot undertake alone. The RC2 recall should remind us that sometimes the best way to help ourselves is to help others - a lesson Thomas the Tank Engine would probably endorse. It took us decades to reduce the amount of lead in our environment; now we must export the lessons of this progress.
In many parts of the world, from Asia to Africa to Eastern Europe, children and workers still face levels of lead exposure not seen here for decades. The red and yellow lead paint at RC2 Corporation's Chinese toy factory may still be used on toys for domestic consumption, or for export to other countries. Our children will not truly be safe from hazardous products and environmental hazards until stiff standards are global norms.
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