Three Halloween items in a study found to have up to 650 times upper limit of lead

[deminks]

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_lawmaker_warns_of_scary_lead_lev_10042007.html

Just weeks before children take to the streets October 31 to collect Halloween treats, a US lawmaker warned Thursday that some of the buckets they will put them into contain scarily high levels of lead.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio commissioned the head of a university chemistry department to test 22 Halloween items for lead.

Three of those items -- a Frankenstein cup and two buckets for sweets -- were found to have lead levels up to 650 times above the upper limit for lead in children's items allowed by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Brown said in a statement posted on his website.

The highest level of lead was found in the Frankenstein cup, which the test showed to contain 39,000 parts per million (ppm) of the potentially toxic metal.

A witch bucket contained 21,000 ppm and a skull bucket contained 2,700 ppm, according to the results posted on the senator's website.

(end snip)

This goes right along with yanking children's health insurance, doesn't it rethuglicans? Poison them and they can't be treated.

Link to Sen. Brown's website:

http://brown.senate.gov/

[Richard Steele]

1. Get enough lead into them when they're young, and they'll vote Republican for life. nm

[Ilsa]

4. And wear pajama bottoms to the senate office and call them

hunting pants (Pete Domenici).

[Noonecares]

2. What happened to old fashioned solutions.

I used a pillow case when I was a kid.

[kestrel91316]

3. We always just used a plain brown paper grocery sack...........

[TahitiNut]

5. Yep. Part of getting ready was decorating the bag with drawings.

I'm repelled by the store-bought made-in-China crap. Another opportunity for parents to have a crafts session with their kids is lost.

[kestrel91316]

6. Lol, we never even decorated our bags that I recall. They were JUST BAGS.

For holding stuff, lol. They weren't entertainment in and of themselves.

It was TOTALLY about the CANDY for us, lol.

[TahitiNut]

7. We used a LOT of orange and black watercolors. Jack-O-Laterns and Witches.

Even the kids that used old pillowcases would decorate them. When we got older, it was about the BOOTY! Yum.

[nonconformist]

8. When I was a kid, we always used pillowcases.

My kids have used the plastic buckets before, but for the last few years they've usually been given a bag at school and we just use that.

[Zookeeper]

9. What I wonder is how many children's products made in China...

over the last ten and twenty years were also contaminated with lead?

What have kids been exposed to for years? What lead-contaminated toys are still being used or ending up in landfills?