Alerting SOL Parents

[- Femme -]

Sleuthing for a Danger in Toy Beads

 

HONG KONG, Thursday, Nov. 8 — The story started with a 2-year-old boy who was taken to a suburban Sydney hospital on Oct. 5 in a shallow coma and suffering from seizurelike spasms. It ended with the latest recall of a Chinese-made toy, as the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered the recall of 4.2 million Aqua Dots in the United States on Wednesday evening.

 

 

Bindeez is also sold under brand names like Aqua Dots.

 

Dr. Kevin Carpenter with Bindeez beads. Once ingested, the beads released a chemical related to a banned date rape drug.

 

Connecting the two events were four weeks of medical sleuthing by Dr. Kevin Carpenter, a biochemical geneticist in Sydney. Dr. Carpenter discovered that the boy in Sydney had eaten Bindeez beads, celebrated as Australia’s “Toy of the Year.”

 

Once ingested, the beads released a chemical related to GHB, the banned date rape drug. The beads are marketed in North America as Aqua Dots.

 

Dr. Carpenter’s story demonstrates how recalls come about, in a time when they are becoming depressingly routine.

 

Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, outside Sydney, first believed that the 2-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, had an inherited metabolic disorder. But when Dr. Carpenter checked urine samples the next day for the chemical markers of the disorder, he found GHB, which can render victims unconscious and even cause death through respiratory failure.

 

“We suspected at that time the child had been surreptitiously given” the drug by a family member or friend of the family, he said by phone from Sydney on Wednesday.

 

A follow-up test two days later showed that the GHB had disappeared from the boy’s body, which confirmed that the chemical had been ingested and was not occurring because of a genetic disorder. It was then that Dr. Carpenter learned that the boy had vomited beads before and after going into a shallow coma.

 

Dr. Carpenter obtained more of the boy’s beads and tested them in a mass spectrometer, a device that helps identify chemical compounds. “I saw a large peak of a substance I didn’t recognize,” he said.

 

The “peak” was an obscure industrial chemical used to prevent water-soluble glues from becoming sticky before they are needed. But when ingested, the chemical quickly breaks down to become GHB. The United States tightly restricts the chemical’s sale and places GHB in the same category as heroin.

 

Dr. Carpenter bought a small quantity of the industrial chemical, a purchase that required considerable paperwork to assure the vendor that it would not be used illegally.

 

He contacted the toy’s worldwide distributor, Moose Enterprise of Australia, who referred him to the Hong Kong office of the manufacturer. The manufacturer provided a list of the beads’ ingredients. The list did not include the dangerous industrial chemical. Dr. Carpenter said the manufacturer was reluctant to provide details of how the beads were made.

 

“The manufacturer was very keen that Moose not know what was in them,” apparently to prevent Moose from ordering identical beads from another manufacturer, Dr. Carpenter said.

 

He alerted the Ministry of Fair Trading of New South Wales, the state where Sydney is located. The hospital’s poison control center then sent out a warning about the beads last Friday to poison centers around Australia.

 

The next day, a mother living near Dr. Carpenter’s hospital found her 10-year-old daughter motionless. Then, the girl began vomiting beads. At the hospital’s poison control center, doctors recognized the symptoms immediately.

 

“Both the children presented with a coma and seizurelike movements,” said Dr. Naren Gunja, the deputy director of the center.

 

On Tuesday, Moose, the toy’s distributor, ordered a recall in Australia of Bindeez beads.

 

On Wednesday, Dr. Carpenter said safety regulators should look beyond Bindeez to conduct laboratory tests on all similar craft toys. These toys, sold under brand names including Aqua Dots and Aqua Beads, contain packets of brightly colored beads that children arrange into mosaics, then sprinkle with water; the beads then stick together in as little as 10 minutes to form durable artworks.

 

The same day, Peter Mahon, a Moose spokesman, said the company had ordered safety tests on Bindeez beads sold in more than 40 other countries, but that it was awaiting results before deciding whether to expand its recall beyond Australia.

 

But Amazon’s British Web site, Amazon.co.uk, abruptly stopped listing Bindeez products for sale. Toys LiFung (Asia) of Hong Kong said that it had removed all Bindeez items from the Toys “R” Us stores that it operates in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

 

Later on Wednesday, the Toronto-based company that markets Aqua Dots, Spin Master, asked retailers across North America to remove the product from their shelves, “out of an abundance of caution.”

 

But late on Wednesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall, saying that two children had fallen seriously ill in the last several days after eating Aqua Dots.

 

In Britain, Aqua Beads is marketed by Flair Leisure Products Plc of Britain. Peter Brown, the chief executive of Flair, said that upon learning of Moose’s recall on Tuesday, the company immediately sent Aqua Beads samples to an independent laboratory for tests. The tests did not show any sign of the precursor to GHB, Mr. Brown said. Flair buys Aqua Beads from a Chinese supplier, but not the same manufacturer or factory as Moose, he added.

 

Flair has nonetheless begun a broader review of any possible toxic risks posed by Aqua Beads. “We are 99.9 percent sure the product is safe, but we are conducting more tests,” Mr. Brown said in a telephone interview.

 

Hong Kong customs officials said that they had sent Bindeez toys to a government laboratory for testing after learning that the Australian distributor had used its Hong Kong office to buy the toy from its maker and ship it.

 

Moose said that it had reviewed the ingredients of the beads and found that some batches did not match the list of ingredients promised by the supplier.

 

“The substitution was not at any time approved by Moose, nor was Moose made aware of any substitution by the supplier,” the company said in a statement, adding that it would add a safe but foul-tasting ingredient to future beads to discourage children from eating them.

 

Moose declined to identify the supplier. Dr. Carpenter said that during his investigation, Moose had put him in touch by e-mail with the manufacturer, whose e-mail addresses ended in @jssy.com.hk.

 

JSSY Ltd. has the Web address with that name, and the company’s Web site describes it as a toy manufacturer with offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan and three factories in mainland China. Lavigne Law, a customer service representative at the JSSY office in Hong Kong, said she was not authorized to discuss Bindeez.

 

During two phone calls on Wednesday, Ms. Law said that she would ask a colleague to return the call and take questions. But another company representative did not return the calls.

 

Source

 

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First it was lead coated toys...now this...honeslty just give your kids rocks, sticks and wooden toys to play with. Safe and nurturing their creativity and imagination. This is just too much.

[RedSea]

Thanks for the heads up Andromeda.

[Jacaylbaro]

Walee meeshan baan cidina war u hayn waxaas ... Ilaahow noo sahal

[Baluug]

I've never seen this product in Canada, guess that's a good thing. LOL this was "Toy of the Year" in Australia, must've been a slow year!!

[LayZie G.]

Red Sea, I knew all along that you were creeping on ina adeertey, now that adiga iska shiftay, Ima have to cut you and your pregnant mistress into pieces. No one creeps on you know what, and gets away with it.

 

 

PS:Kii shiineyskii oo ladhahaaye Zu iyo our sista rahiima sheekadaan ma ogyihiin. Rahiima iyo ilmaheeda, iyo Zu iyo asaga kaligiis(the SOL version of michael jackson) allaha ka ziyaadiyo dhibaatada toys ka oo lagu soo koobay dalkii australia

[RedSea]

Originally posted by LayZieGirl:

[QB]

Red Sea, I knew all along that you were creeping on ina adeertey, now that adiga iska shiftay, Ima have to cut you and your pregnant mistress into pieces. No one creeps on you know what, and gets away with it.

LOL@Layzie, yaa kuu sheegay ma mr. Jaylaani?

 

Dumaashi, I will be a great dumaashi to you, cuz your inader will make a great wife and I will make a great husband. Trust me on that.