Playing it safe; regulation and cooperation with industry yield safer products for kids, says CPSC Chairman Ann Brown.

Regulation and cooperation with industry yield safer products for kids, says CPSC Chairman Ann Brown.

In an age when technology seems constantly to provide new gadgets to help parents care for, teach, and entertain their children, the risk of product-related injuries to kids looms larger than ever before. That's why Ann Brown and her staff at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have so much work to do to keep children safe from hazardous products.

Brown's office is buzzing these days. Four years ago, she was the newly appointed CPSC chairman, with a stated agenda of revitalizing the formerly dormant agency. (The new, improved CPSC TRIAL, Sept. 1994, at 22.)Now, it seems, she is well on her way to accomplishing her goal.

Brown's aggressive public education efforts have raised the agency's visibility and substantially increased its workload. To streamline its work and reduce unnecessary regulation, the commission has instituted a new fast-track product recall program, which enlists product manufacturers in a cooperative effort to get hazardous products off the market faster by leapfrogging certain standard regulatory steps.

Brown says the fast-track program-which is one of 25 finalists in contention for the 1998 Innovations in American Government Award, a program of the Ford Foundation and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government-has accelerated the recall of potentially dangerous products by up to 600 percent. Many of the products recalled under the program have been those posing hazards to children.

In a recent interview with TRIAL Managing Editor Julie Gannon Shoop at CPSC headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, Brown explained how a combination of new-style cooperation with industry and a willingness to regulate products the old-fashioned way when necessary have improved product safety for children.

Can you estimate what percentage of the commission's work deals with products that might endanger kids?

Keeping children safe is my highest priority. America is blessed with wonderful children, and it's our obligation to keep them safe.

Fully 40 percent of our budget is devoted to activities and projects involving children. For fiscal year 1998, this represents $18 million. That's a large chunk to go to one enterprise, but children are worth it.

You have a daunting task facing you, keeping tabs on thousands of products either that are designed specifically for kids or that kids come in contact with in their homes and schools.

That's exactly right. It's not just children's products. For example, young children are at great risk from fires. They have twice the risk of dying in a fire compared with the population as a whole. In recent years, children under the age of five represented 20 percent of the total residential fire-related deaths in this country.

Consumer products used in the home are sometimes involved in starting house fires. For instance, most upholstered furniture fires start from children playing with lighters and matches.

How has the new fast-track recall program helped in the area of child safety?

It's an innovative program that can increase, speed up, and streamline recalls. It's good government. Everybody benefits from this program. Millions of potentially dangerous products are removed from the marketplace faster, and faster means saving lives and preventing injuries. Speed is of critical importance to us because days can mean lives.

In the fast-track program, companies are offered a creative alternative to a key part of CPSC's standard recall procedure. Government and business can work voluntarily together in a program that can save both time and money.

This has been a very, very successful program. It's made it easier for companies to do the right thing.

What, specifically, has been taken out of the standard recall process?

In the fast-track procedure, we do not make a preliminary determination of a product defect. The company reports a possible hazard to us, which it is required to do by law, and simultaneously proposes a plan to recall the product within 20 working days. If the CPSC finds that the firm's plan is satisfactory to address the hazard, we accept the plan and then work together with the company to expedite and publicize the recall.

This eliminates our need to make a preliminary determination, which involves an extensive legal and technical review. That process can take months.

Using fast-track, we've recalled children's toys, clothing, juvenile products with small parts that could cause choking, bicycles, high chairs, playground equipment with structural problems that could result in falls, bunk beds, play yards that pose a strangulation risk, and basinette stands and strollers that have stability problems.

We've also recalled some nonchildren's products, such as furniture that can tip over or freezer chests that a child can climb into and suffocate in.

Faster recalls are clearly a good thing, but there is a separate problem of consumers who don't hear about recalls once they are implemented. What is the agency doing to get the word out to more parents and get more hazardous products out of circulation after consumers buy them?

You've hit on a big problem. We can get products off the store shelves. We can get companies to stop distributing them, to stop manufacturing them. But getting them out of people's homes is our huge challenge. We have doubled, tripled, quadrupled our efforts in this area.

We publicize the recalls on morning shows and network news shows. We produce video news releases for local television stations that are seen by millions of consumers. We hold press conferences.

We work with editors of magazines to develop articles on recalled products. We work with companies to provide posters to pediatricians' offices and stores. We send direct mail to consumers who have returned registration cards.

We also work with hundreds of other organizations to get the word out, such as the National Child Care Association, National Safe Kids Campaign, National Head Start Association, Salvation Army, Goodwill,

The best thing a manufacturer can do is to build safety into its products,' says CPSC Chairman Ann Brown. YMCA... you get the picture.

All our recalls are listed on our Web site, and we've been averaging 400,000 to 500,000 hits per month.

Our toll-free consumer hot line operates 24 hours a day and gets about 20,000 calls a month.

In addition, we highlight the dangers of formerly recalled products each spring during something we call Recall Roundup. We've done this in 1997 and 1998, and the roundup has been seen each year by more than 20 million consumers on local television stations.

Even with this effort, we need the cooperation of parents. People with children have to make themselves aware by watching for this information on their local news and asking their local newspaper to run a recall column. There's some obligation there, too.

What would you say are the three most dangerous products for children today?

Instead of looking at individual products, we look at categories of injuries. There are three hazards to which young children are particularly vulnerable: fires, head injuries, and poisonings. Those are three major areas of concern for us, and we have a number of activities under way in all of those areas.

Two areas that we're particularly active in to reduce fire deaths are upholstered furniture and multipurpose lighters. We've issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on upholstered furniture and are considering whether to propose a mandatory rule to require upholstered furniture to resist ignition from small open-flame sources such as lighters or matches or candles. These fires have caused an average of 100 deaths a year, and many of the victims have been children.

We also have an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on multipurpose lighters. These are the lighters you use to light a fireplace or barbecue grill. I was in a restaurant recently, and they were using them to light the little candles on the tables.

The problem is that kids think they're toy guns. Kids love them, and kids have started fires with them. So we're considering whether to propose a rule requiring these lighters to be child resistant.

Head injuries are another leading cause of death and disability to kids. In 1995 alone there were 800,000 product-related head injuries to kids under 15 years of age, about 60 percent of all product-related head injuries.

We have just recently approved a mandatory safety standard for bike helmets. Beginning in March 1999, every bike helmet sold will have to have labeling saying it meets the CPSC standard. There won't be this alphabet soup of standards from different organizations. People will know they're getting the best bike helmet they can get.

The new standard is more stringent than before. There's a requirement for extra chin strap protection so that if somebody falls off a bike, the helmet won't roll off. And it has special provisions for helmets for kids under age five that require the helmet to cover more of the head so that the fragile areas of the kid's skull are more protected.

What are you doing in the third area you mentioned, poisonings?

We enforce the Poison Prevention Packaging Act, which requires those child-resistant caps that can drive you nuts in the night when you want to take some aspirin. But the caps on aspirin and prescription drugs alone have saved 800 children's lives since they were required by law in the early 1970s.

In January 1998, new requirements went into effect that all those caps still have to be child resistant, but they now must also be adult friendly. You'll find when you buy your medication that it's much easier for you to take those caps off, even though they are just as child resistant as before. Whenever I make a speech, this one gets a big round of applause from all the folks over 21.

When I was here four years ago, you told me that of all nursery products on the market, baby walkers caused the most injuries resulting in emergency room visits. You had just begun rulemaking to address this problem. What was the result of that process?

Baby walkers are a major success story. We published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on baby walkers. It is wonderful how a potential regulation stimulates an industry's creativity.

Now there is a whole new generation of safer baby walkers, and it was done voluntarily by the industry. We will be monitoring the marketplace to ensure that manufacturers are following the new voluntary walker standard before deciding to terminate the mandatory rulemaking.

I'm going to tell you about something that will boggle your mind. There is a new model of baby walker made by several companies that stops at the top of a flight of stairs and will not go down. You have to see it to believe it.

How does it know to stop?

There's a gripping mechanism on the bottom of the walker that prevents it from going down the stairs once one of the wheels goes over a step. It stops dead in its tracks. We've tested them in our labs.

There are also some baby walkers that are fat, so they can't go through doors. But those are a little bulky.

We're not telling people to buy baby walkers. That's up to the parent. But if a parent wants one, there's a new generation in the stores now. The new ones are labeled to say they meet the new standard.

Last spring, the CPSC and the GapKids clothing chain recalled thousands of children's windbreakers because the paint on their zippers contained an unacceptable level of lead. We hear a lot about peeling lead paint in housing, but why hasn't more attention been focused on lead levels in consumer products? Is this a significant health risk for children?

We have a strong record of removing products from the marketplace that contain lead and result in exposures that are hazardous to children.

For example, we have gotten manufacturers to eliminate the use of lead as a stabilizer in vinyl miniblinds. As the blinds aged, they slowly deteriorated and lead dust formed on the surface. Kids were putting their hands on the blinds and licking their hands and ingesting high levels of lead.

I've heard heartbreaking stories of toddlers who died when their necks became trapped in the collapsed top rail of a portable play yard. The commission has issued a number of recalls over the past several years, yet in recent months two more children died from this type of injury. What can be done to stop the deaths?

In the 1997 and 1998 Recall Roundups, we featured five brands of play yards that we have recalled since 1993--over a million and a half folding portable play yards where the top rail can collapse and catch the baby's neck, and the baby can strangle and die.

In April 1998, we publicized these products with other products in our Recall Roundup, but, sadly, in May 1998, in Chicago, a 17-month-old boy strangled in a previously recalled play yard at his day care center. The center had been given this product, and the staff did not know that it had been recalled. In August, a 10-month-old New Jersey infant died in a similar incident.

The commission held multiple press conferences and broadcast video news releases by satellite so that local television stations could report these stories. We told people that any parent or any day care provider can call the CPSC and get on a list where we will automatically send them all our recall notices.

It's incumbent upon day care centers to receive our notices. They can receive our recall notices by mail, fax, or e-mail. Or if they have a computer they can call the notices up on the CPSC's Web site at www. cpsc.gov. Day care providers who don't have Web access can visit libraries with Internet connections to find out about our recalls. If you're going to run a day care center, you have a certain responsibility.

These were tragic events. It breaks our hearts when a child dies, but especially when the death involves an already recalled product.

Is that type of portable play yard being manufactured anymore?

No. There is a new standard. On models in the stores now, the latches on the rails automatically lock into place when the play yard is set up.

Two years ago, the CPSC voted to ease its long-standing children's sleepwear flammability standard, so that tight-fitting garments no longer are required to meet flame-resistance rules. Children's advocates have asked why the agency stepped back from a standard that was working. I've heard it was a 2-1 vote. Were you the lone holdout?

Yes.

So you're not happy with the change that was made?

Let me first defend the other two commissioners and say they were not doing this to take a step backward.

Our data shows us that children are getting burned when they wear large, loosefitting cotton T-shirts as pajamas. The goal of the amendment was to give parents a cotton alternative for sleepwear. The other two commissioners felt that tight-fitting cotton pajamas would do this safely since they don't catch fire as easily as the big shirts.

Parents want cotton. What the other commissioners felt, and I didn't feel, was that if parents could buy tight-fitting cotton garments, they would switch over from the loose-fitting T-shirts.

I understood the goal, but I didn't agree with the means. I didn't think parents would stop buying big T-shirts because the tight-fitting garments were available. So I voted against this change. I thought it would be a step backward in safety.

And I hated that there was an exemption for sleepwear for children under 9 months old. The rationale was that infants don't move around. But I know kids that young move around. I had a child who walked at 10 months, and at 9 months she was getting around. So I very much object to that part of it.

Toys with small parts pose a choking hazard that never seems to go away. How successful has the CPSC been in educating the public about age restrictions for these toys?

There were still 10 deaths in 1996 from choking--that's 10 deaths too many. But 7 of those deaths were related to balloons. Where our problem is these days is with balloons.

Kids love to chew or mouth an uninflated balloon. They inhale a piece of that latex, and they can suffocate and die. That's what we're trying to tell parents. You have to keep balloons away from little kids. Can you have a birthday party without balloons? Maybe so.

We have a clear new labeling provision that requires toys for kids three years old through five years old to have a label warning of certain hazards, like small parts. These labels tell parents a particular toy is not for children under three years old, so they know to keep an older kid's toy away from their little kids.

What does the CPSC do to prevent children's products that violate mandatory standards from entering the United States from other countries, and what enforcement tools does the agency use against foreign manufacturers?

The CPSC and the U.S. Customs Service conduct joint surveillance at the points of entry and examine shipments of toys coming into the United States. Everything coming in has to meet our standards. Customs, working with the CPSC, prevents millions of violative toys from ever entering the United States. With toys and many other products, we can stop them right at the docks, before they ever get on store shelves.

We can seek injunctions against firms that import, distribute, or sell, for instance, toys that violate our standards. We can seek civil and criminal penalties against companies for violations.

Generally, would you say that manufacturers are paying enough attention to child safety?

I think manufacturers are paying a lot more attention to child safety. I think what they need to do is pay the most attention possible to child safety. There's nothing more important. I think that this agency's being much more proactive has encouraged even more attention.

What more can manufacturers do?

The best thing a manufacturer can do is to build safety into its products. That means the safe use of the product doesn't always depend on the parent or child using the product as specified by the manufacturer. We all know that mistakes happen, and manufacturers should design products with this in mind.

Would the new baby walkers be an example of building in safety?

Exactly. Or the new high chairs that have a built-in crotch restraint that keeps the baby in place so the baby can't submarine out and get strangled on the tray. You still should fasten the strap around the baby's waist, but if you forget, the baby doesn't strangle.

When attorneys have information about hazardous products that have harmed children, how should they report it to your agency?

For four years, we've had a special toll-free hot line for professionals to report product-related injuries, and we don't get anywhere near the number of reports we should be getting. We have received some useful tips resulting in recalls, but the pace of reporting to the agency has really been laggardly.

One of the things liability attorneys are doing is helping the public by working with individual clients. But they need a sense of the greater good as well, and that means they should report to us every time they have a case.

I've been disappointed with reporting by lawyers, and I hope that I'll see a great, great deal of difference in the future. I urge trial lawyers representing people who have been injured by defective products to take a few minutes to call the CPSC's professional hot line at [phone]. Making this call is a service to all consumers.