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The winners of the 92nd annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and reporting on veterans’ care and on drug and product safety scored top honors in the journalism category:
The Public Service prize went “to the Washington Post for the work of Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille in exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.” The Post’s Walter Reed and Beyond website includes the original stories and slideshows, as well as reporting on the federal response.
The Investigative Reporting prize had two winners: “Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker of The New York Times for their stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other everyday products imported from China, leading to crackdowns by American and Chinese officials”; and “the Chicago Tribune Staff for its exposure of faulty governmental regulation of toys, car seats and cribs, resulting in the extensive recall of hazardous products and congressional action to tighten supervision.” The New York Times doesn’t appear to have a special page dedicated to Bogdanich and Hooker’s reporting, but their initial article is here and others are listed here; the Chicago Tribune has a Kids at Risk website for its articles and resources.
Congratulations to the newspapers, reporters, and staff for their excellent work – and thanks to all of the journalists who are drawing attention to health and safety shortcomings and prompting officials to address them.
On Thursday, the Senate approved legislation that will boost funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, increase the agency’s enforcement power, and effectively ban lead in all children’s products. The House bill passed in December contained similar provisions, although that chamber raised the maximum fine for companies that fail to report product hazards immediately to only $10 million, compared to a Senate cap of $20 million. Compared to the current maximum of $1.8 million, though, those are both big improvements.
There are some ways in which the Senate bill is markedly tougher than the House bill, though – and tougher than what the White House wants. The Washington Post’s Annys Shin explains:
As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but that’s not the whole story. It’s also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply aren’t strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems we’re facing and offer suggestions for how to fix them.
The Presumption of Safety: Limits of Federal Policies on Toxic Substances in Consumer Products identifies these four limitations in the current regulatory system:
We’ve written before about how the Consumer Product Safety Commission lacks both the authority and the will to come down hard on companies that keep their unsafe products on the market. Now, Public Citizen has tallied up the time that elapsed between the dates when the CPSC learned of several dangerous products and the dates when the agency issued warnings about the hazards. Their results will probably worry anyone who’s purchased a coffee maker, bicycle, or infant swing over the past few years.
UPDATED BELOW
Annys Shin of the Washington Post has reported that Dr. Gail Charnley, a well-known corporate product defense expert, is the White House’s leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
We’ve written extensively here about this beleaguered agency. Finally, after the nation watched helplessly at the recall of millions of lead-contaminated toys, President Bush has evidently decided to replace current Chairman Nancy Nord with someone more competent to safeguard the interests of manufacturers of dangerous products.
The Post article lists a few reasons the public might be concerned about a Charnley appointment, including one dispute over a missing conflict of interest disclosure. Curious about Dr. Charnley’s work, I spent a little time on the web reviewing selected aspects of her work, and have turned up what appears to be a new failure to disclose a pretty basic financial conflict. But I’ll return to that after reviewing what the Post has learned:
Congress left town last month without passing legislation that would overhaul the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose weakness has been apparent in recent problems with toys containing lead, dangerous magnets, and a chemical that metabolizes into the so-called date rape drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. They did pass a ban on industry-sponsored travel (after the Washington Post reported on trips for CPSC officials sponsored by the toy industry), and they gave the CPSC an $80 million budget for the next fiscal year, which represents the agency’s biggest budget increase in 30 years.
The Washington Post’s Annys Shin reports that the money “will go toward additional staff and improvements to its antiquated testing facilities.” In a separate article, she focuses on one retiring CPSC staff person who will be hard to replace:
In all the rigmarole of the holiday season, you might not have heard about the consumer safety hazard associated with Christmas lights (or noticed the fine print warnings on their boxes).
It’s no secret that lead is used in light strings’ polyvinyl chloride insulation to prevent deterioration and to guard against fire. But what is a new development this year is the revelation that handling the wiring while you “deck the halls” may result in significant lead exposure.
Once again, toys are turning up with high lead levels – and, once again, it was an advocacy group, rather than the Consumer Product Safety Commission, that did the tests and broke the news.
The nonprofit Ecology Center, working with other groups across the country, bought and tested 1,268 children’s products, and found that 35 percent of them contained lead. The results from their tests – which also looked for polyvinyl chloride, cadmium, and arsenic – are available at www.healthytoys.org.
Tracey Easthope, Director of the Center’s Environmental Health Project, explains why they took on the project:
Elizabeth Williamson of the Washington Post has written powerful article on the failure of the regulatory system to ensure that amusement park “thrill” rides don’t kill or injure customers, primarily teenagers and children. She provides grisly detail on a topic we’ve talked about here before: the inability and/or unwillingness of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect the public.
After describing one series of identical accidents that occurred several times on the same ride, Williamson notes
The CPSC has no employee whose full-time job is to ensure the safety of such rides. The agency’s 90 field investigators — who oversee 15,000 products, work from their homes and live mostly on the East Coast — are so overstretched that they frequently arrive at carnival accident scenes after rides have been dismantled.
As a result, critics say, supermarket shopping carts feature a more standardized child-restraint system than do amusement rides, which can travel as fast as 100 mph and, according to federal estimates, cause an average of four deaths and thousands of injuries every year.
The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, a group created by asbestos victims and their families, bought products from national retailers and had them tested at independent labs. One of the most disturbing findings was high levels of asbestos in powder from a toy CSI fingerprint kit. The powder is intended to be sprinkled on surfaces and brushed with a soft-bristle brush – creating conditions ripe for inhalation.
Andrew Schneider reports on the group’s findings in the Seattle P-I, and notes that CBS, which licenses the kit, has asked its licensees to have the kits tested immediately and to remove the toy from the market if it’s found to be unsafe.
Why is a small organization – which spent more than $165,000 getting products tested at government-certified labs – taking on the job of policing consumer products? Schneider explains:
By Paul D. Blanc
The interconnections among toxic butter flavoring, fatal coal mine “bumps,” and tainted Barbie accessories may not be immediately obvious - but they all reflect the failures of an increasingly compromised U. S. regulatory apparatus.
In early September, news broke that the artificial butter flavoring chemical diacetyl had caused severe lung disease in a hapless consumer who liked his popcorn just a bit too much. The resulting publicity spurred the leading industrial user of diacetyl, ConAgra, to remove the chemical from its product line. Thus was accomplished in one day what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was unable to do despite half a dozen years of accumulated evidence that the chemical was causing lung disease in workers exposed to it on the job.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Williamson reported on industry-financed trips that Consumer Product Safety Commission chairs had taken. Today, she writes about other CPSC staff members (from both the Clinton and Bush administrations) who took such trips, and about proposed legislation spurred by the CPSC travel revelations. Meanwhile, eight new toy recalls have been issued.
After Consumer Product Safety Commission acting chair Nancy Nord opposed Senate legislation designed to strengthen the agency, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling for Nord’s resignation. The Washington Post’s Annys Shin has the story:
We’ve been following the crescendo of stories illustrating the severe limitations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (here, here, and here): CPSC lacks the resources to test products adequately, it can’t levy hefty enough fines to deter corporate wrongdoing, and it can announce a recall only through a news release that it negotiates with the company involved .
Now, a bill is moving through the Senate that would boost CPSC funding, increase maximum penalties for violating product-safety laws to $100 million from $1.85 million, protect whistleblowers, and let the understaffed agency hire at least 100 more people. (The Wall Street Journal has more details.) Manufacturers and retailers aren’t happy – and neither is the CPSC acting chair Nancy Nord, reports Stephen Labaton in the New York Times: Read the rest of this entry »
The recent recalls of dangerous toys and defective cribs have received a great deal of press attention, but closer analysis reveals that consumer product recalls are generally ineffective at getting most defective products out of consumers’ homes.
By David Michaels
Most media coverage of Friday’s announcement by the Consumer Products Safety Commission and a crib manufacturer that one million cribs were being recalled missed the story behind the story. Stung by an avalanche of bad publicity on its failure to protect children from toys with lead paint or dangerous magnets, the CPSC appeared to be getting ahead of the problem, taking action after the death of (only) two infants.
In fact, the CPSC had known about the risk of infant suffocation posed by these cribs for many months, and the Chicago Tribune had been investigating the agency’s unwillingness to do anything about it. Although the CPSC is denying it (see below), it appears that the agency acted only when it looked like it would be embarrassed in the press yet again.
By David Michaels
In a few short months, the country has awakened to several potential hazards associated with Chinese toys. Mattel and other manufacturers have already recalled millions of toys, some for lead paint and others because they contained magnets that, if swallowed, could cause severe injuries. Now, Louise Story of New York Times reports that the Walt Disney Company will conduct lead tests on 65,000 toys and other children’s products made by 2,000 companies that license Disney characters.
Things have gotten so bad that toy manufacturers are actually asking for federal regulation. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
Gretchen Morgenson, the terrific New York Times reporter, has a disturbing piece that describes how the toothless Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has little ability to force hazardous consumer products of the shelves of toy stores.
The focus of her report is on super powerful miniature toy magnets. They are candy colored and easily eaten by small children. Morgenson’s article is a powerful case for new legislation that gives the CPSC some real power. It is also another piece of evidence documenting how law suits serve as the de facto regulatory system, since our public health agencies don’t have adequate tools to force better corporate behavior. Read the rest of this entry »
