When the sportswear firm included a giveaway bracelet with its shoes, it could hardly have predicted the repercussions. Claire O'Connell reports
Last February a four-year old boy was admitted to hospital in Minnesota suffering from vomiting, tummy pain and listlessness. Within days he was dead. From his stomach the autopsy recovered a small, heart-shaped metallic charm imprinted with the name "Reebok".
The swallowed trinket, which came as a free gift with a pair of shoes, was found to consist of more than 99 per cent lead and is thought to have poisoned the boy, according to reports from the United States Centers for Disease Control. Tests on similar charms revealed lower levels of lead but Reebok has now recalled the bracelets worldwide, including 19,550 that were on the Irish market.
Lead can be ingested or inhaled into the body where it can have toxic effects. Children are particularly susceptible to lead poisoning because they absorb the heavy metal more efficiently than adults, according to Dr Joseph Tracey, director of the national poisons information centre at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital.
"So for a similar dose, children will have a much bigger body burden," he says.
Tracey explains that, depending on the dose, lead can cause a range of problems in children including neurological deficits and brain damage as well as blood problems such as anaemia.
However, he notes that acute lead poisoning is not a big problem in Ireland and that in general our exposure to lead has reduced in recent decades because it has been removed from consumer goods such as food and beverage cans, petrol and paint.
Consumers are also protected by a series of general directives that place an onus on the producer to ensure that a product is safe, says John Hanley, a product safety enforcement officer at the Office for the Director of Consumer Affairs. He says that in addition to the general safety directives, certain classes of items like toys and cosmetics must comply with particular standards that set down acceptable thresholds of lead.
However, he believes that because the charm bracelet in the Minnesota poisoning case was jewellery, the toy standards would not have applied. "If that Reebok bracelet had been a toy it would have been subjected to testing that would have measured the amount of lead present in the item - it would have failed and never have reached the market," he says.
Once a problem is identified, as in the Reebok case, the fallback is to recall the product, and Hanley says most producers are responsible enough to take action themselves. "They don't want the liability coming back on them," he says.
Regulations also stipulate that products declare significant lead content on the label, and Hanley recommends that consumers read labels and look for standards markings as a general practice.
"The safety information that you need to know should be explicitly there and if anyone has a doubt about a product they should give us a call," he says.
Lead use is also tightly restricted in the workplace, according to toxicologist Dr Edel Healy, a senior inspector with the hazardous substances assessment unit of the Health and Safety Authority (HSA). She says a main reason for the controls is because high lead exposure is known to harm fertility and development in the womb, and its effects can include sperm damage, miscarriage or malformations of the embryo.
The HSA enforces health and safety regulations that compel employers to carry out risk assessments and identify and control all chemical hazards, including lead, says Healy. She says activities with risk for lead exposure include lead smelting, lead-acid battery or crystal glass manufacture and blast removal and burning of old lead paints.
Healy adds that employees who work with lead also have a responsibility. "The key thing would be hygiene practices like washing their hands after they use it and that they have separate clothes for their work because that's one of the major routes for exposure," she says.
Healy explains that the HSA also enforces marketing and uses legislation which prohibits lead compounds in substances or preparations on sale to the general public such as paint, although she notes the regulations allow professional use of some lead paints for historical restorations.
"The bottom line is if you walk into a DIY shop there should be no lead-containing paint in there, and if there is, there's a problem," she says.
Reebok helpline, 0044 1524 591 888; Office of the director of consumer affairs helpline, 402 5555 (01 area), 1890 220 229 (outside 01 area); Health and Safety Authority Workplace Contact Unit, Lo-call 1890 289 389