Recalls are issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), an independent government organization created in 1972 to protect consumers from dangerous products. The CPSC has the power to mandate safety standards and to recall, or even ban, hazardous products. The recall process usually begins when several consumers call the agency to complain about a product. "Someone goes and talks to them about how and why the product is dangerous," explains Cassie Thorsen, a spokesperson from the Chicago office of the CPSC. "Engineers will take a look at the product to determine if what happened was just a one-time incident. We have to determine the potential for injury and how serious that injury could be." If the product is determined to pose a significant risk to consumers, the CPSC issues a recall and takes action to pull the product from distributors, but months or even years have passed since the product entered the market. It's not terribly difficult to notify retailers that the recall has been issued, but it's nearly impossible to reach all the consumers who already have bought the recalled products. That's the best case scenario. More commonly, dangerous products are not brought to the attention of the CPSC. In 1998, only 4,300 consumers called the CPSC hotline to report hazardous products; that same year, 225,096 children were treated for injuries caused by faulty children's products. Many people contact manufacturers instead. By law, corporations are required to notify the CPSC within 24 hours of hearing about a potentially dangerous product. Responsible companies will report complaints promptly, but not every company can be counted upon to do so."Despite the law, the CPSC has never been able to rely on manufacturers to report their own product defects," contends Marla Felcher, author of It's No Accident: How Corporations Sell Dangerous Baby Products (Common Courage Press, 2001). In 1999, she says, the CPSC's division of hazard identification and analysis spent close to $7 million investigating complaints made to manufacturers who did not report them to the CPSC. The CPSC, which has more than 15,000 types of products under its jurisdiction, is frank about its own limitations. "We may or may not investigate your product complaint," its website states. "We receive about 10,000 reports of product-related injuries and deaths a year from consumers and others. Due to our small staff size, we can investigate only a few of them." 
Because of the CPSC's relatively small staff and budget, it takes more than one product-related injury to warrant an all-out investigation, and there often is a lengthy delay in determining the risk. Meanwhile children can continue to be injured or even killed by the same faulty product. How many complaints does it take to warrant action? In 1998, Safety 1st received more than 700 complaints about its Bouncing Buggy--a plastic car attached to a rocking base--before the CPSC issued a recall, and it took a shocking 3,000 complaints and 200 reported injuries to initiate the recall of Cosco's Geoby Two Ways tandem stroller in February of 1999. 
 
The notification dilemma

Identifying a dangerous product is difficult, but pulling that product from every home and store shelf is impossible, particularly when a product has been on the market for months or even years before the recall is issued. "Once a product is in distribution it's hard to get it back," says Thorsen of the CPSC. The number of items affected by recalls is daunting. In 2000, the CPSC recalled children's products at a rate of nearly two per week, affecting an estimated 37 million individual items. Manufacturers and the CPSC have a hard time getting the word out about all these products. Manufacturers are required by law to release a joint press release with the CPSC when one of their products has been recalled. But the wording of these releases can be ambiguous, and child advocacy groups complain that dangers are often downplayed. "The final recall notice is so watered down that it's difficult for anyone to know with any degree of certainty how serious the problem is," says Felcher. 
These press releases are distributed to national media wires, as well as major newspapers and radio and television stations. But unless there's something especially notable about a particular recall, it's unlikely to get much media attention. "The press doesn't always cover every single recall, so that's not the most effective way to notify the public," says Thorsen. "It's really a kind of whoever-hears-about-it-hears-about-it system." Some companies also notify pediatricians and retailers when one of their products has been recalled, but even these extra efforts seem weak when compared to the emphasis put into advertising campaigns for their other products. "The last thing manufacturers want is for news of a recall to get too much attention," says Felcher. "In the short-term, well-publicized recalls are expensive to carry out; in the long-term, they can invite product liability lawsuits, damage a company's image, and erode shareholder wealth." Product registration cards also are of limited use for notifying consumers about recalls. "One of the problems we have is that most of the registration cards are never returned," says Laurie Oravec of Fisher Price "People are afraid they will be used for marketing." Some corporations have given up on using registration cards for this reason. "Currently we do not put registration cards with any products other than car seats," says Carol Dingledy of Cosco. "We found the return rate was only between 10 and 15 percent." 
Since neither the media nor manufacturers effectively inform consumers about product recalls, many parents never find out that some of the products in their homes are unsafe. According to a recent survey, 70 percent of Illinois voters say they hear about recalls less than four times a year--that's about three percent of the actual number of recalls. 
 
The root of the problem

Recalls wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't so many dangerous products. So why do so many unsafe children's products make it to store shelves? "Many parents would be shocked to learn that there are no mandatory testing laws for most children's products," says Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids in Danger, a Chicago-based advocacy group that works to improve the safety of children's products.The only children's products that have mandatory safety standards are car seats, pacifiers, toys and cribs. Everything else--strollers, high chairs, playpens, you name it--can be placed on the market without undergoing any kind of safety testing. Under federal law, the CPSC is not permitted to mandate testing for these other products as long as the industry issues voluntary standards. 
Manufacturers claim that the current system does the job, but child safety advocates disagree. "There are too many children that are still being killed and injured by faulty products," says Cowles. "We really need to have mandatory standards."Consumer advocates meet with the corporations twice a year to make and modify voluntary standards for the children's product industry. Although consumer advocates struggle to make their voices heard, nearly all decisions come down to a simple vote. The manufacturers hold the majority. "Voluntary standards require only minimum levels of performance and fail to address all hazards posed by a product," says Felcher, who researched this issue for her book. She says the process of determining standards is "dominated by manufacturers' engineers, whose job it is to balance the precarious trade-off between child safety and corporate profit." But those problems aside, the bigger issue remains that voluntary standards are, as the name implies, not mandatory. It is at the company's discretion whether or not they follow the standards and test their products for safety. Most well-known corporations will indeed test their products to comply with voluntary standards. "I can't imagine that any manufacturer that wants to protect their reputation would ever put out a product without testing it," says Laurie Oravec from Fisher Price. "You can't meet those standards without testing it first." But these standards don't require field testing. Tests are often performed in controlled laboratory settings. As any parent knows, a child's behavior is difficult to anticipate, and so are a product's potential dangers. 
"They can make [a product] to the best of their ability," says Jennifer Szwalek from the Juvenile Product Manufacturers Association, "but until it's actually in the situation, you can't tell all the risks." As a result, voluntary standards often fail to take into account the real-life risks associated with a product. Many children have been killed because of problems as seemingly insignificant as unclear assembly instructions or an ambiguous product warning. 
In addition, safety standards, which take years to develop, are unable to keep up with the torrent of new products from the booming baby product industry. "Parents want the best and latest products," says Cowles. "New products are developed and rushed to shelves too quickly. The time to make sure it's a safe product is not often taken." For example, baby bath seats were introduced to the market in 1981, but it wasn't until 18 infants had died that the industry began working on a safety standard, and 43 more were killed before the standard actually passed. It took 10 years and 16 deaths before voluntary standards were proposed for infant swings. 
 
No end in sight

While the processes by which products are recalled and consumers are notified are slow and insufficient, the real problem is that unsafe products are continuously being developed, manufactured, advertised and sold. "Recalls are just a Band-Aid," says Cowles. "We need to get to the root of the problem." Illinois representative Jan Schakowsky recently introduced a federal bill that would require mandatory independent testing for all durable infant products, such as furniture and other large items. Safety standards would be set by the CPSC, and most importantly, they would be mandatory, not voluntary. "Today our answer is to recall dangerous products after babies have been killed or injured," says Schakowsky. "My bill would make sure that dangerous products don't make it to the market in the first place." 
It may take months before this bill is brought before Congress. Before then, there are likely to be long and contentious debates about how effective it would be and how great a burden it would put on manufacturers and government agencies. Meanwhile, children will continue to be injured and killed, the innocent victims of a system that fails to protect them from dangerous products.