Toy Safety Hazards Bring Warning From Senate as Christmas Nears

WASHINGTON — Trista Hamsmith told a Senate panel Tuesday the Christmas story no parent wants to endure.

Her normally lively daughter, a toddler named Reese, began coughing and exhibited difficulty breathing last year. A doctor diagnosed her with a common childhood respiratory infection called croup, gave her medication and sent her home.

As her symptoms worsened, Reese’s parents noticed a button cell battery missing from their television remote control. They took their daughter to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston where doctors found the girl had swallowed the battery.

A fistula formed in her esophagus from battery acid. She was fed through a tube in her stomach and her lungs collapsed.

Hamsmith told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee on consumer protection about being near her daughter’s bedside as hospital personnel talked about reviving the 18-month-old.

“No pulse, no pulse, again and again,” the Lubbock, Texas, mother quoted them saying. The girl died eight days before Christmas.

Reese’s story was the centerpiece anecdote during a Senate hearing Tuesday on the safety of children’s toys.

More and more of them are sold under counterfeit brand names and contain unsafe materials or components, according to product safety experts who testified. Many are purchased online with little chance of tracking them to manufacturers in distant countries.

Toy safety concerns led Consumer Protection subcommittee Chairman Sen. Richard Blumenthal to introduce a bill this week called Reese’s Law.

The pending bill would require the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to develop stronger safety standards for button batteries within one year. It also would compel manufacturers to put warning labels and child resistant packaging on button batteries.

An additional question discussed at the Senate hearing is whether button battery safety would realistically resolve safety problems with children’s toys.

In one recent case, a shipment of counterfeit toys from China was intercepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Port of Baltimore. They later were found to contain the toxic materials barium, cadmium and lead.

Blumenthal said that “150,000 toy-related injuries were reported in 2020 alone, and nine deaths.”

He added that consumer awareness is rarely an adequate protection when the end users are children.

“Kids don’t care a lot,” Blumenthal said.

Other risks come from swallowing magnets that can block intestinal passages, balloons that suffocate children or sharp toy components that can cut them severely.

Toy safety is supposed to be the job of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a small government agency charged with eliminating “unreasonable risks” of consumer goods. The agency evaluates the safety of products, coordinates recalls when they are unsafe, develops safety standards and researches product-related illnesses and injuries.

“They are the main watchdog and warning system for consumers, so these kinds of tragedies can be prevented,” Blumenthal said.

The agency also lacks adequate funding and must go through a rule-making process for safety regulations that Blumenthal described as burdensome. He suggested more funding and streamlined rule-making.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn said that as more retail purchases come from online sales, consumers “are more concerned about where these products are coming from and why these products might be unsafe.”

She suggested closer government oversight of the retail supply chain to ensure unsafe toys and other products never reach U.S. markets.

The hearing came on the heels of a U.S. Public Interest Research Service report this month called “Trouble in Toyland.” It warns about toys sold under counterfeit or knock-off brand names through websites that act as third-party retailers, of what the report calls “middlemen.”

Traditional retailers must have a certificate of compliance with government safety standards.

“The middlemen do not consider themselves to be traditional retailers and therefore often do not follow the same rules that a traditional retailer would,” says the report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Service, a nonprofit consumer watchdog group. 

The report’s author, Hannah Rhodes, told the Senate panel, “Unfortunately, the burden is on consumers” to identify unsafe counterfeit or knock-off toys. Few of them have the ability to recognize the risks, she said.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission advised recently that toys sold in well-known retail stores like Walmart, Target and Best Buy are safe. The agency would give no assurances about lesser-known retailers.

Tom can be reached at [email protected]