Hohoho-horrible toxic toys for Christmas

It’s a good 84 days (and a thousand and one sighs) to Christmas, but already, some stores are decking up for the holidays and selling Christmas décor. Soon, you will be making a list and checking it twice. Soon, the toy stores and department stores’ children’s sections will be bursting with toys for Christmas. But before you dash through traffic to buy something for all the little ones on your kilometric Christmas list, hear this Christmas refrain: You’d better watch out for those toxic Christmas toys.

As the days (and people’s tempers) grow shorter and nights (and the traffic and the lines to the cash register) grow longer, an advocate for children’s health and safety steps up its drive against toys laced with toxic chemicals.

Fact is, our friend Manny Calonzo just e-mailed to say that EcoWaste Coalition recently released the test results involving 200 toys bought from various retailers in six cities — Cabanatuan, Gapan, Pasay and Manila in Luzon; Cebu in the Visayas; and Davao in Mindanao. These samples include a wide range of affordable toys costing from P10 to P 150. To find out if they were toxic or not, the toys were subjected to heavy metal analysis using a portable X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) device.

According to Thony Dizon, coordinator of the EcoWaste Coalition’s Project Protect, the six-city sampling alarmingly shows that toxic toys can be found everywhere, posing serious health threats to children.

Now, that’s bad tidings for Christmas.

Dizon thus urges the authorities, “Lead and other chemicals of concern that could jeopardize children’s healthy development should be prohibited in the manufacture of toys and other products targeting child consumers.”

He points out, “Children are at the greatest risk of being harmed by these chemicals as their vital organs and systems are still developing. Kids are likely to ingest these health-damaging pollutants because they tend to bite and chew objects such as toys, as well as put their hands into their mouths.”

So, here are the test results: Out of the 200 samples, 110 (55%) passed the screening for heavy metals such as antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury.

The other 90 samples (45%) failed the test — they were found to contain one or more metals above levels of concern that were not known to unsuspecting consumers.

Most  of the toxic toys were found in Cebu City (28 out of 50 samples), followed by Davao City (23 of 50 samples), Cabanatuan and Gapan City (21 of 50 samples), and Pasay and Manila (18 of 50 samples).

Dizon laments, “We are particularly bothered by the high levels of lead, a chemical poison that attacks the developing brain of young children,  in most of the tainted samples.”

How much lead exposure is dangerous?

Pediatric toxicologist Dr. Bessie Antonio of the Philippine Society of Clinical and Occupational Toxicology stresses that “there is no level of childhood exposure to lead that can be deemed safe.”

She’s quick to add, “Children’s exposure to lead could result in life-long health problems and should be avoided as much as possible.”

Experts warn that if lead gets into a child’s body, it can bring about mental retardation, low IQ, learning and speech difficulties, hearing loss, poor school performance, attention deficit disorder, violence and other behavioral problems, as well as anemia and kidney damage.

Hohoho-horrible toys, aren’t they? The top six toys with found the highest concentrations of lead — beyond the 90 parts per million (ppm) limit for lead in paint under the US Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) — were:

1. Mobile phone toy, bought in Davao City, 7,035 ppm lead.

2. Pokemon action figure, bought in Cabanatuan City, 6,656 ppm lead.

3. Kidshop Animal Land, bought in Pasay City, 3,465 ppm lead.

4. Makeup set toy, bought in Davao City, 3,047 ppm lead.

5. Dino World, bought in Davao City, 1,608 ppm lead.

6. Eagle hanging toy, bought in Manila City, 1,557 ppm lead.

Found to have the highest levels of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury were:

1. Cartoon Car, bought in Cabanatuan City, 2,163 ppm antimony.

2. Super Shots Car, bought in Manila City, 294 ppm arsenic.

3. Marble with red design, bought in Davao City, 4,236 ppm cadmium.

4. Makeup set, bought in Davao City, 14 ppm mercury.

This campaign is aimed at stressing the importance of consumer awareness as well as regulatory vigilance against unlabeled, unlicensed, and unsafe toys.

Dizon makes this final plea, “As Christmas draws near, we ask toy makers, toy sellers, and toy givers to exercise utmost responsibility and offer only labeled and licensed items that have passed rigorous physical and chemical safety tests.”

He adds, “We also ask parents and other toy consumers to seek and demand for nothing less than the healthiest and safest toys from traders this Christmas season.”

Make this season of joy a safe one for our little bundles of joy!