Toy charms at hospital gift shop found to have high lead levels
Action by an alert Health Department employee visiting a gift shop at Fletcher Allen Heath Care has triggered a state attorney general’s investigation into a line of children’s jewelry with potentially high lead levels.
Mike Sullivan of Fairfax, an employee of the department’s health protection division, said a moment of “whimsy” on his part led him to examine some small metal charms at the gift shop last month while in the hospital on personal business.
“I’d taken a couple of the charms off the rack to look them over and they seemed, for their size, quite heavy,” he said. “Afterward, I started thinking about the possibility of them having lead content.”
Days later, Sullivan went back to the shop, bought two of the charms and had them tested for lead. He said one of the charms, formed in the shape of a calculator, was found to have a high lead reading.
Friday, as a result of Sullivan’s actions, the Attorney General’s Office issued a new warning about the dangers of lead in children’s jewelry after a laboratory test found that the charm Sullivan purchased contained 92 times the maximum set by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Assistant Attorney General Elliot Burg said he does not know how many other stores in the state may be selling the same or similar products. “It’s very difficult to tell how many items like this are out there,” Burg said.
Sullivan said the charms he bought had no identifying brand name or description of where they were manufactured. Noble said the products were distributed by Ganz Inc., based in Cheektowaga, N.Y., near Buffalo, and were made in China.
Ganz’s Web site said the company sells gifts and accessories to 30,000 stores in the United States and Canada. Company spokeswoman Susan McVeigh, contacted Friday, said she was unaware of any problems with its children’s jewelry.
