Yesterday’s announcement of the recall of close to one million Fisher Price toys left me with a pit of dread in my stomach. I headed to our playroom with the list of affected toys in hand and started to match product numbers on the list against our toys. Far too many matches for my liking; fortunately for us, though, all our products were purchased prior to May of this year.

At the time I was checking, I wasn’t aware that the affected toys were from a limited production date range, so I was understandably upset by the amount of things on the list that both my daughters have been playing with over the past couple of years. Big Sister Coole is just now coming out of a Dora phase, so when Daddy Coole was sick, and then after he died, people were very generous with gifts for her. Since most everyone knew she liked Dora, we have most Dora items on the list. We did get rid of some in a garage sale earlier in the year, but then I felt horrid about the possibility of having sold toys tainted with lead to more innocent and unwitting people.

According to the National Safety Council, there are many different health effects associated with elevated blood lead levels:

Young children under the age of six are especially vulnerable to lead’s harmful health effects, because their brains and central nervous system are still being formed. For them, even very low levels of exposure can result in reduced IQ, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, behavioral problems, stunted growth, impaired hearing, and kidney damage. At high levels of exposure, a child may become mentally retarded, fall into a coma, and even die from lead poisoning. Within the last ten years, children have died from lead poisoning in New Hampshire and in Alabama. Lead poisoning has also been associated with juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior.

After having watched Daddy Coole suffer through his torturous illness, I’m not in any way ready to watch my children get sick (not that anyone ever is), especially if it’s something that is in any way preventable.

Mattel said that most of the toys were actually pulled from the shelves before even being sold. Still not acceptable, though: there should have been stringent safety effects in place from the get-go here, not three months after the fact. It doesn’t matter if they caught most of the toys before they were sold – clearly some were sold, and how many people who bought these toys may not even hear about it? I try to keep fairly up on these things, but I suspect I’m in the minority there. And you can bet with the types of toys these are (being targeted to babies and toddlers), a lot of them are going into kids’ mouths. It’s hard to be hyper-vigilant about all the possible safety hazards that there are out there for kids, but when we’re buying products specifically created for very young children, it would be nice to think they were actually safe for them.