Keeping toxic toys away from children

This Christmas, Santa would do well to pack a lead-testing kit in his bag of toys. That is, if any of them weren't made in his workshop, but exported from China.

Those toys could be contaminated with lead paint -- which is toxic if ingested by the very people who play with toys, young children. More than 9 million such toys have been recalled from American store shelves.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois is calling on manufacturers to voluntarily inspect toys to make sure they are safe. This is not only a good idea from the perspective of preventing children from being poisoned, but it is in the toy manufacturers' and sellers' best economic interests. The Christmas shopping season is just around the corner. A collapse in toy sales caused by parents fearing contamination would be disastrous to merchants and would be felt throughout the economy. But even voluntary inspections by toy manufacturers should be certified by an independent third party.

Or, U.S. companies could look elsewhere for their toys, other than China, or demand anything they buy meet the strictest product safety specifications. Failure to do so is taking a terrible risk from both a safety and business standpoint.

Durbin and U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk also want more funds to firm up product safety inspections, also critical for protecting public health and improving consumer confidence in toy purchases.

The Consumer Protect Safety Commission is barely functioning because of stagnant funding and staff cuts. In July, an Associated Press story reported a veteran product safety commissioner as saying that commission employees are looking for other jobs because "they have no confidence the agency will continue to exist -- or will exist in any meaningful form."

Additionally, Kirk wants stiff fines levied against those who knowingly import contaminated goods.

But Durbin's high emphasis seems to be on what we have to do to keep dangerous products from coming ashore, when Congress and the Bush administration also need to go to the source and hold China firmly accountable for abiding by the rules of product safety in doing business with us.

To his credit, Durbin has been insisting that China cooperate in allowing American product safety personnel to do inspections in its country. So has Kirk. If China can't figure out what is harmful, we have inspectors who can do that job, even if that shouldn't be their job.

We would suggest China might be more motivated to assure it is exporting safe products if failure to do so meant suspension of beneficial trade tariff treatment China is now getting from the United States.

China needs to know, in clear terms, that it isn't going to be making money from us in selling toys for children that merit the posting of a skull and bones on the packaging.