I guess they don’t make toys like they use too, or if they always made them this way, we are just learning about it now. Mattel like so many other companies has its products made in China, and just like the poisonous seafood and the poisonous dog food, Chinese standards for making toys seems dangerously low. I’m pretty sure any loving parent would pay just a little bit more for their children’s toys if they were assured that they were built with the child’s safety in mind. Why are toys being made with excessive amounts of lead paint? The effects of lead poisoning in children are numerous. I would like to highlight just a few of the things a child with lead poisoning could experience. This includes damage to the nervous system and brain development, Encephalopathy, and Cerebral Palsy. It can affect growth and development, impairing growth, and causes weight loss. It can affect behaviour, causing aggression, attention problems, irritability, and lethargy. It can also impair hearing and sight, and damage motor skills. It also can have negative effects to the digestive system, and affects blood and circulation, and can cause Renal disease. Worst of all lead poising in children can cause death. In adults lead poisoning can cause (amongst many other things) still birth in women, erectile dysfunction in men, and it can cause sterility, infertility, and impotency. The government of Australia has very strict regulations on lead paint used in houses, and as of 1997 domestic paint could only contain 0.1% lead. One Canadian Medical Journals says the legal limits for domestic paint are 0.5%. It kind of makes me wonder just how much poisonous lead was in these Barbie dolls. Health Canada does not regulate the safety of toys, instead it is up to corporations and importers to monitor products for safety, but maybe federal officials should be responsible so that there are high standards are consistently met. If these are the cases we are hearing about, imagine what toys get into our country that have excessive lead paint but never get recalled. Maybe Mattel is facing hard times, and that is why they have to build their toys in China. Maybe if parents promised to continue buying the toys if they cost a little bit more so long as they were safe, Mattel could then open up factories in North America, and hire North Americans to make the toys, and that way we could easily monitor the amount of lead paint in these toys, and that way Mattel would not have to make all these embarrassing recalls of its products and have parents stressed when buying their children toys.

-Jason Setnyk