Toxins in toys guide to released

The Consumer Action Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Toys has just released the confirmation of several toys on the market being toxic and harmful to children in spite of promises from the manufactures to take greater precaution when the lead laced toys were first discovered earlier this year.

Frightening levels of dangerous toxins are being found in the some of the most popular children’s toys on the market leading up to the holiday purchase season. With Christmas shopping right around the corner this is most disconcerting indeed. This important information can be found as it is now been made available to the public at http://www.healthytoys.org. The documented findings provides products ranking for the most universally purchased children's and measures their levels of lead content, cadmium, arsenic and other harmful chemicals.

Amid the slew of recalls, this list will come as a welcomed addition to the holiday precautionary measures to ensure safe holiday purchases in general, but especially for children. While, more than 1,200 children's products have been tested, most children’s toys still remain on store shelves. Of those remaining toys on store selves that have been also tested several are measuring at a 35 percentage level of lead content. These lead levels are extremely high and above the federal recall standard used for lead paint.

Popular toys such as Hannah Montana card game case, a Go Diego Go! backpack and Circo brand shoes were among the items with excessive lead levels in the tests performed by a coalition of environmental health groups across the country. Only a low 20 percentage of the toys and other products tested contained no traces of lead or harmful chemicals, according to the results released on Wednesday by the Michigan-based Ecology Center along with the national Center for Health, Environment and Justice and groups in eight other states. There were 1,268 items tested and merely 23 were among millions of toys recalled this year.

Toy giants like Mattel Inc. are at the heart of these astonishing findings of lead contaminated toys. Mattel Inc. had to recall more than 21 million Chinese-made toys on fears they were tainted with lead paint as well as tiny magnets that children could accidentally swallow. Mattel's own tests on the toys found that they had lead levels up to 200 times the accepted limit.

"This is not about alarming parents," said Tracey Easthope, director of the Ecology Center's Environmental Health Project. "We're just trying to give people information because they haven't had very much except these recall lists."