When you hear people talk about lead poisoning hazards, one of the first things that comes to mind is peeling paint chips in poorly maintained innercity apartments. Probably the last that would come to mind are vinyl-backed baby bibs. Which is what makes the story in last Friday's Chicago Daily Herald such a stunner.
Reporter Steve Zalusky interviewed a suburban grandma who apparently triggered a major investigation by the Center for Environmental Health, based in Oakland, Calif. Seems the grandmother had heard a news account about an investigation by that group, which had turned up lead in plastic lunch boxes. It caused her to wonder whether just any plastic might be contaminated.
So, she bought a test kit and used on her grandson's baby bib. When it tested positive for the toxic heavy metal, she bought more bibs and tested those as well. All came from a Chinese supplier for Wal-Mart, Zalusky says.
In a new report that the Center for Environmental Health released last week, Caroline Cox, its research director, noted that over the past 6 months, her group had purchased more than 50 brands of vinyl baby bibs and screened them. It then sent 18 that tested positive to an independent lab for further analysis.
The report said that vinyl portions of four "contained significant amounts of lead, above 600 parts per million." Cox explained that her group used that cutoff "because the Consumer Product Safety Commission classifies paints with more than 600 parts per million of lead as 'banned hazardous products.'” One subsequently tested bib from a Wal-Mart brand actually contained a whopping 9,700 parts per million lead.
On May 2, the Oakland Center announced that as a result of legal action it had taken, Wal-Mart will no longer sell the bibs, at least in California. When regulators in Illinois and New York learned of the problem, they negotiated with Wal-Mart for it to cease selling the bibs in their states as well.
However Cox's group found, Wal-Mart was not the only company selling lead-tainted bibs. A few other major companies distributed bibs that also tested positive. For now, the Center for Environmental Health recommends, worried parents should test any vinyl bibs their youngsters are using and substitute non-vinyl versions where lead is found.
The good news: At least this is an avoidable hazard. It's not like powdered lead wafting in open windows of buildings that lack air conditioning--something that Arlene Weiss, a consulting toxicologist with Environmental Medicine, in Westwood, N.J., documented last year.
I interviewed her at the Society of Toxicology meeting in San Diego. In the March 25, 2006 Science News, I note that the federal limit for lead in house dust is 40 micrograms per square foot of swabbed area. I then cited a study that Weiss and her colleagues had published 1 month earlier documenting that this lead limit "can be exceeded on [indoor] surfaces near windows in New York City after only 3 weeks of dust accumulation" from outdoor sources.
The choice there: Keep the windows tightly closed and swelter in the summer heat--or vacuum and damp-wipe all surfaces daily.
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