Nearly 11 million Fisher-Price tricycles, high chairs and toys are being recalled over safety concerns.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission said Thursday that two of the products, Fisher-Price Trikes and Tough Trikes toddler tricycles, have a protruding plastic ignition key near the seat that children have sat or fallen on, causing genital bleeding.
The agency knows of six cases of young girls, ages 2 and 3, who have been hurt and required medical attention. The recall includes 7 million tricycles in the U.S. and 150,000 in Canada.
Fisher-Price, which is owned by Mattel Inc., also is recalling more than 1 million high chairs. They have pegs on the back that, officials said, have caused cuts, including seven cases where stitches were required.
More information on the recalled toys and other products can be found on Mattel’s recall web page.
The recall is the largest for toys since Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act two years ago, which bolstered the authority of the CPSC, Bloomberg reports.
News of the massive recall comes as, The New York Times reports, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is being swamped by manufacturers of toys and related items lobbying to have their products excluded from the agency’s definition of a “children’s product.”
Falling under that definition will mean that a product is subject to the tougher safety requirements of the 2008 consumer product safety legislation. The law’s passage was spurred by the 2007 recall of 45 million toys and other children’s products, many of them made in China and tainted with lead.
The manufacturers lobbying the CPSC, including makers of Halloween costumes and footballs, have argued that their goods should be considered “general use products” because they are so widely used by adults.
A key step came Wednesday when the commission, in a 3-to-2 vote, adopted a general definition of a children’s product – a definition that exempted, for example, toy trains regarded as collector’s items, not toys. Heavy industry lobbying is expected to continue, however, as commission staffers decide how to apply the new definition case-by-case.
