But in January , at a gift show in Atlanta, Zucker received an ominous call from a sales rep. The 2-year-old son of a retail client had swallowed two magnets. The boy was fine--the balls passed through his system without harm--but the store didn't want to carry Buckyballs anymore.
Unsure what to do, he went back to his booth and wrote more orders. Oddly enough, the CPSC's inquiry wasn't related to the incident with the 2-year-old. It had to do with the warning labels on the Buckyball packages. Zucker didn't realize it at the time, but magnets were a sore spot for the agency. When Congress established the CPSC, in , it gave the agency sweeping authority to set safety standards, ban products, order recalls, and levy fines in more than 10, product categories.
But in , the Reagan administration slashed its budget and added onerous rules that cowed it to industry. For instance, the CPSC had to get companies' permission to disclose their brand names during most recalls. So it cut a lot of deals. If a company agreed to recall a product quickly, the agency allowed it to deny its product posed a hazard--vital armor against the nation's hordes of personal-injury lawyers. But in , crisis struck. An investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune published a series of scathing product-safety articles.
The first began with a preschool teacher pleading with a rep on the CPSC's hotline: Magnets from a building toy called Magnetix had come loose, a 5-year-old boy had swallowed them, and he'd almost died. The agency took the report but did nothing. Six months later, little Kenny Sweet Jr. The story, which later won a Pulitzer Prize, showed a pattern of ignored warnings, ineffectual recalls, and avoidable deaths--much of it because, the series alleged, the CPSC was "a captive of industry.
Later in , millions of toys were recalled for illegal levels of lead--news that dominated the headlines, given that it raised concerns that America had ceded quality control to China. In , Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation to overhaul the agency. A separate rule banned children's toys with neodymium magnets small enough to swallow. A printout is tacked on Wolfson's wall next to the children. The headline: Not Until a Boy Died. Zucker wasn't up on this history, but he hired a lawyer who was.
Alan H. Schoem was a product-safety lawyer and a year veteran of the CPSC. Together he, Zucker, and Bronstein untangled the warning-label issue. To be extra safe, they changed the warnings to Keep away from all children! Just 50 sets were returned. Zucker felt he was securely on the right side of the law.
The children's-toy standards didn't apply, because Buckyballs was not a children's product. Schoem agreed.
Bronstein left the company after disagreements with Zucker but kept a 50 percent stake. There had been more ingestion incidents, but Zucker had stayed in front of the issue, participating in a CPSC press release that warned parents. To him, the good news outweighed the bad: Buckyball sets were becoming a hot holiday gift, making People magazine's "hottest trends of the year.
Unfortunately, some wound up in children's stockings. After the holidays, the number of ingestion incidents spiked. In the first half of , there were 25 reported cases--more than in the entire year before. In the scheme of things, the number was small there were , toy-related injuries resulting in emergency-room visits in But the status of Buckyballs as a hot new product, paired with the gruesome nature of the injuries, made for a sensational news story.
On the front page of The Washington Post appeared an article about Meredith DelPrete, a year-old girl from Virginia who was hospitalized after swallowing two Buckyballs. She had tried to use them to mimic a tongue ring.
The child went to the hospital with what her parents believed was stomach flu. An X-ray revealed she had eaten 37 Buckyballs, punching three holes in her lower intestine and one in her stomach. In Louisiana, Dr. Adam Noel, a pediatric gastroenterologist, was spending a quiet evening at home when he got a call from the emergency room. A boy had some sort of necklace in his stomach.
It turned out to be 39 Buckyballs inside his intestines. Noel had the boy rushed to the New Orleans Children's Hospital, where he removed the magnets in a two-hour operation.
In the months that followed, Noel witnessed two more cases at the hospital. One was Braylon Jordan, who had swallowed eight magnets not Buckyballs. The damage was so severe that the boy had all but about 5 inches of his small intestine removed--requiring him to eat through a chest tube and use a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. Alarmed, Noel emailed other pediatric gastroenterologists, asking if they were seeing similar incidents. More than 30 other doctors said they had.
Something had to be done about this. In June , a group of 14 doctors went to Bethesda to urge the CPSC to stop the sale of these magnets, and then to Capitol Hill to lobby their representatives.
The magnets have been repositioned as adult toys, sold in packages of hundreds of BB-sized balls that can be formed into countless shapes, such as a striped tie featured on the cover of a recent Brookstone catalog.
And kids are still ingesting them. A group of 17 pediatric gastroenterologists recently met with the CPSC about the number of serious stomach and intestinal injuries they continue to see when kids swallow the magnets. Some doctors recommend banning their sale altogether. Watch video, above. In its complaint, CPSC said warning labels didn't work because the hundreds of tiny magnets can't be labeled and the boxes are thrown away.
It asks why regulators are trying "to put us out of business" and why warning labels are enough for other products but not theirs. The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing will focus on changes made to a product safety law, including efforts to reduce the cost of product testing. But panel chair Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif.
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