A massive recall has been initiated by toy company Mattel this week, and there's an excellent chance that one of the affected toys is in your home if you have a toddler pining for Elmo or Dora. Almost a million toys were affected (One! Million! Toys!), although 2/3 of those were stopped at the retail level from reaching consumers when Mattel contacted toy sellers like Wal-Mart and Toys 'R Us to halt sales of the lead-covered toys.
These aren't the cheap little dollar-store toys we usually talk about that have been recalled; nope, these are highly visible, could-be-in-your-home toys.
Here's a list of all the affected toys.
Apparently Nickelodeon and Sesame Workshop, who license the characters Dora and Elmo respectively, will be initiating third-party product testing to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. While that's probably a relief to toddlers everywhere, it doesn't speak to the larger problem of outsourcing in a country that may or may not share the same safety regulations as the countries it exports to.
And at the consumer level, we have no way of knowing where that cat food, those tires, or those toys were made, and whether they might ultimately be harmful because of either inadvertently or willfully relaxed safety standards. Which means we are relying on our own government and the largesse of companies that profit from what we buy to protect us and our children from harm.
Ugh. Right now I feel like crawling into a cave.
