Chemical substitutions jeopardize safety

Last week's recall of 4.2 million Aqua Dots rang the alarm bell again for the toy industry. After promising that this would be the safest holiday season ever, the industry is once again licking its wounds.  This time it wasn't lead paint or tiny magnets; it was a hazardous chemical that can form into GHB, the "date rape drug," if ingested. 

The highly-promoted Aqua Dots promised to be one of this holiday season's hottest toys.  So how could it happen that this mainstream toy could cause such serious health effects?  The answer: unscrupulous business practices and the lack of vigilance to detect them.

The glue on Aqua Dots beads was supposed to contain the chemical compound 1,5-pentanediol.  But the products that made at least nine children seriously sick had 1,4-butanediol, a similar but hazardous substitute.  According to the New York Times, the cost of the substituted chemical was less than one-third that of the chemical that was supposed to be used.

But this is the same story we've seen with other products.  Chemical substitutions in Chinese-made products have rocked the product safety world this year.  It started with melamine in pet food, an ingredient used in fertilizer that gave the pet food artificially high protein readings.  Then it was diethlyene glycol, a component of antifreeze, used in toothpaste as a substitute for its more expensive cousin, glycerin.  And then it was the lead paint that was used in toy factories that was labeled as lead-free.    

Chemical substitutions in products are not only jeopardizing our safety but tarnishing venerable brand names in the American marketplace.  We doubt that the manufacturers of these products were aware of the surreptitious substitutions made at the factories they hired to produce their products. The problem calls for constant vigilance: better quality control and continuous testing to ensure that each and every batch of products made meets manufacturing specifications and all of our recognized safety standards.  And our government watchdog agencies need to ensure that the testing is being done, and done correctly.

All that testing may result in slightly higher prices for the products, but parents, pet owners and other consumers likely would be glad to pay the higher costs for the peace-of-mind of knowing that their purchases were safe. On top of that, maybe the appeal of outsourcing manufacturing to foreign factories would become less financially attractive once the true cost of producing safe products is factored in.

—Don Mays