A toy story

In the spirit of the season, the people at Public Interest Research Group in Massachusetts last week brought dangerous toys to Bangor, set them in front of children and told anyone willing to listen not to buy them. The toys were said to be able to choke, strangle, deafen or poison your child. It is hard to recall anyone advocating for toys that maim, but a presentation that suggests a lurking evil in the aisles of the local toyshop is equally improbable.

In the entire decade of the 1990s, fewer than 200 children nationwide died as a result of accidents with toys. Certainly this represents 200 tragedies that might have been avoided, but it is also an infinitesimally small number of the total accidental deaths (some 400,000 from car accidents alone during that same time) and a tiny fraction of the deaths of children. Children, by the way, not only don’t suffer accidents at the rates adults do, they also largely miss out on major killers like heart disease. Statistically, childhood (ages 1 to 14) today is the safest time of your life.

While the PIRG representative in Bangor gave an elaborate list of possible hazards, the danger really comes down to kids choking on either balloons or small parts from toys. PIRG last week warned of these – is there a parent with a pulse who doesn’t already know that it’s a bad idea to let baby suck on a deflated balloon? – then went further, arguing that a few toy manufacturers are, in effect, poisoning children.

The manufacturers are said to be doing this by using an additive to polyvinyl chloride plastic called phthalates, which makes the plastic soft and which PIRG and others say can leech out of toys and cause liver and kidney damage. A sobering charge, only it’s not so clear that it’s true.

A phthalates study by the federal Center for Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction last year, for instance, found that phthalate toxicity levels in animals were at least 1,000 times greater than the maximum levels to which humans may be exposed. The year before, a group of scientists led by former Surgeon General Everett Koop reviewed the safety evidence and potential impacts of phthalates in toys for young children, concluding that the material wasn’t harmful under normal use. That same year, two endocrinologists published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology a risk assessment in which they concluded the plastic additive did not present a significant risk to children.

All of this is worth noting because interest groups like PIRG, however well-intentioned, can scare the bejabbers out of parents, kill sales of toys and create a lot of confusion, all during the Christmas season, when it’s too late for toy companies to effectively rebut the claims. So be careful with balloons around babies, as you were before the PIRG show-and-tell, but be equally careful with information you receive from people trying to scare you.