Danger remains on store shelves
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- December
- 10
The state Consumer Protection Board’s Safe Toys NY Campaign continues to find toys with unsafe levels of lead on store shelves, prompting Gov. Eliot Spitzer to call on the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission to immediately issue a recall notice on products identified by New York’s investigations. He is asking the state Consumer Protection Board to draft legislation that would create and improve standards in the industry and better inform consumers about dangers.
“It is startling to learn that tainted toys are still lingering on our shelves,” Spitzer said in a statement.
“The federal government, through the CPSC, has the responsibility to protect the public from unsafe toys, but a lack of funds and inadequate staffing hamper their ability to act in a timely manner. That leaves us with no choice but to act on our own to protect New Yorkers as soon as we become aware of a safety hazard, in this case, lead paint on toys,” he said.
Since August, the state has conducted sweeps of more than 2,800 stores looking for recalled products. About 620 recalled toy items were still found on shelves, according to the governor. A random sampling of products found three toys, all available in dollar stores and made in China, whose paint exceeded the federal standard of lead levels allowed. They are “Army Force” car set; “Sprite Tractor Trailer” toys and “Wrestle Mania” action figures.
About 5,000 children are diagnosed with lead poisoning each year in New York, mostly from lead paint in older housing.
Information about recalls and the Safe toys NY program is available at www.nysconsumer.gov, which is updated daily. Recalls are also posted on the state Health Department Web site at www.health.state.ny.us.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 10:35 am by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
