CPSC database turns one

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director 

March 11, 2012 marks the first anniversary of the launch of the Consumer Product Safety Commission database, which can be found at http://www.SaferProducts.gov.

I recently gave the consumer perspective on the database at the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization (ICPHSO) annual meeting in Florida. The creation of the safety database has been a longstanding interest of mine and of other consumer advocates. In 2007, while working at Consumers Union, I testified before the Senate asking that consumers have access to critical information about products that have caused injury or harm.

We said then that consumers need and want safety information when making an important purchase. Whether it be buying a car, lawn mower, or items for a baby, consumers want the benefit of information about a certain product’s safety record. The database was finally authorized by Congress and I believe it is one of the most important consumer tools to emerge from Washington in several years.  A lot of work goes towards ensuring the database is as accurate as possible. When consumers lodge a complaint, the CPSC gives the named manufacturer 10 days to respond before the incident is made public. Consumers also have to provide specific information about the product and the information is then screened by CPSC for accuracy.

How is the database working for consumers? Well, there have been 6,300 incidents posted in less than one year. That tells me that the database has been a great success, despite an effort by some manufacturers and their supporters in Congress to shut it down. For example, Representative Joann Emerson, a Republican of Missouri who sits on the House Appropriations committee, said about the database: “Funding should go for other priorities of the agency before being spent on a poor and inaccurate resource for consumers.”

With all due respect, I beg to differ with the Congresswoman. Let’s look at the data on inaccuracies- of the 1,600 reports now included in the database, only 194 were found to contain inaccurate information, most often because the consumer mistakenly named the wrong manufacturer or model number of the product and CPSC’s Communications Director, Scott Wolfson said that most of these mistakes are “easily corrected.” In fact, there’s been several analyses of the database. An analysis from the House Commerce Committee Democratic staff last June contained these findings:

• Only a few months after it was launched, the database had more than 1,600 incident reports from consumers, health care professionals, and public safety officials, 1/3 of those reports involved deaths or injuries.
• 11 incidents reports were of fatalities – infants dying in cribs and playpens, and teenagers and adults killed riding ATVs.
• The database contained 483 reports of incidents that resulted in injuries, including to children suffering amputations when their fingers got trapped in the hinges of strollers with the stroller make and model provided so other consumers can be aware of the problem.
• Many other reports were of product defects that could cause injury – a baby gate whose hinges broke and fell down the stairs, a hair dryer that sparked when a Mom was drying her daughter’s hair, front loading washing machine that burned the clothes, and electronics that began overheating and smoking with normal use.

Kids and Cars Analysis:

Another analysis from the nonprofit group Kids in Danger that has done so much excellent work on product safety and children also analyzed 2,433 entries on the database from April 1 to August 1, finding that:

• 20% of the reports involved injuries to children.
• 14% of the reports involved recalled products, telling us we need to do a better job of getting them out of the marketplace
• Product failures – like Pogo sticks coming apart or improperly constructed trampolines were very much in evidence.

Then the CPSC itself has its own analysis. As for the accuracy of the information in the database, the CPSC’s analysis shows that 84 percent of 6,300 reports include the model and serial numbers. Eighty-two percent of people who filed reports also allowed their contact information to be passed on to the manufacturing company, allowing the company to address their complaints.

I think these numbers demonstrate the overwhelming success of the website. Why? Because it is doing exactly what Congress intended it to do and doing so with a lot of specificity. And it is giving consumers who encounter dangerous products a place to go to help warn other consumers so they don’t get injured.

Let me add that what goes onto the website is very carefully screened by CPSC: consumers can’t just post any old piece of information. They need to provide a description of the product or substance, the name of the manufacturer, they must describe the death, injury or illness caused by the product, and they must provide a date when the incident occurred.  Then upon filing, the consumer must say who they are – consumer, a health care professional etc, provide their name and address, and verify that the report is accurate.

Consumers are offering very detailed and very helpful reports of their interactions with products, information that is useful to consumers and manufacturers alike. One mother found her son’s head wedged under a baby bumper – the manufacturer of the bumper refused her a refund since she hadn’t bought it from them directly. Another found a bottom tubular rail of a crib had collapsed. The manufacturer’s website was down so she couldn’t report it to them. One grandmother bought a crib and tried to put it together but it lacked an important part. When she called the manufacturer they said they knew there was a problem and would send her the part.

And I think the staff at the CPSC have done a marvelous job in designing the website – including 10 days to respond a posting, CSPC has provided more than due process to manufacturers and retailers who wish to comment, respond or defend their product.

Once again, consumer advocates believe the database has provided an invaluable tool for consumers and to consumers’ great  credit, they have more than risen to the occasion. There has long been a demand for this kind of place to share information and I’m proud of consumers for their many responses.

To the manufacturers who are seeing defunding of the database, and your supporters in Congress  – we ask you to resist the urge to shoot the messenger.  A far better approach would be to embrace the database, review it daily, and find out where the hazards are. A quick response and a fix of the hazard could prevent lawsuits and most importantly, you’ll be demonstrating that your first priority is to protect the health and safety of the customers that buy your products and keep you in business!

Saving fingers and pushing for safer table saws

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I spent yesterday morning at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) listening to a report from the Commission’s staff on Table Saw Blade Contact Injuries – this is the culmination of many years of study and deliberation and even a favorable vote toward a mandatory safety standard in 2006 that never materialized. Table saws are inherently dangerous devices to anyone who comes within 10 feet of one. A blade spins on a table at 100 mph and cuts through thick pieces of wood, even metal.  Even watching the saw in action is scary, knowing what it can do to fingers or hands upon contact is even worse.

But table saws are a staple in any woodshop, no woodworker can operate efficiently without one.  And these saws are also among the most dangerous devices, inflicting nearly 67,300 injuries a year, half of which land victims in the emergency room. Many of the injuries are severe and cause lifelong pain and trauma  – amputations from table saws occur 10 times a day, according to CPSC data.

However, today we have a technology, invented by Oregon scientist and patent lawyer Steve Gass, that all but removes the danger of table saws. It operates with a sensor that can distinguish between human flesh and a piece of wood, stopping the blade in a millisecond and preventing injury when it senses flesh. The company Gass runs – which now makes table saws because no manufacturer would license his technology back in 2001 or 2002 when he first developed the prototype – is called SawStop. 30,000 SawStop saws are in operation today, many in shop classes and cabinetry workshops.

The CPSC staff – which is made up of lawyers, scientists, engineers, actuaries, statisticians, and human factor experts – gathered all the relevant information in order to brief the five CPSC commissioners and make a recommendation that the commission move forward with an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. That’s the first of three steps – the last of which would be a final rule or regulation requiring safe table saws.

The fact that the CPSC has moved forward on its own – without being specifically required to do so by congress –is unusual in itself. What’s even more unusual, though, is that there is a near total fix to a major safety hazard – one that causes 40,000 plus injuries a year. NCL wrote a letter in November to the Commissioners asking them to adopt a mandatory safety standard with this flesh detecting technology. NCL has been front and center in pushing the CPSC to jumpstart an otherwise dormant process.

Finally, one of the most hopeful signs that we will get an effective safety standard were the comments by Republican appointee, Commissioner Anne Northup, at yesterday’s presentation. No liberal, Northrup had this to say about the proposed ANPR and possible federal safety standard: “Thanks for putting this on the agenda. I’ve wanted this on the agenda for a long time. If you’ve ever known anyone who was injured by a table saw, it’s debilitating and expensive to treat. This is the kind of work I came to the Commission to do.”

We are hoping that within a year – give or take – we might well have a new mandatory safety standard from the CPSC, requiring flesh detecting technology, perhaps starting with the larger saws and eventually required on all of them.  The CPSC was established to address just this type of hazard. We are pleased to see them moving forward so decisively.

Good News for Consumers: Potential Safety Hazards Getting Better Disclosure by Feds

by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Some good news for consumers: we’ll soon be getting far better disclosures about potential safety hazards for food and drugs. In a blog about a month ago, I cheered the passage of major reforms in the Consumer Product Safety Act, which will help protect consumers, especially the most vulnerable ones — children — from dangerous or defective products. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) regulates more than 15,000 consumer products, ranging from all-terrain vehicles to electrical outlets to high chairs and bassinets.

Last week I sat in on an all-day briefing, sponsored by the CPSC, detailing highlights of the new law. One of the most important and exciting changes is that CPSC will be setting up a public database to give consumers access to information about products that other consumers, or CPSC, or manufacturers themselves have found dangerous, defective, or otherwise problematic.

Also last week the CPSC announced that it was recalling — without the manufacturer’s cooperation — a bassinet that has been implicated in the deaths of two babies, and that it was making the announcement as a result of new powers Congress had granted under the reform legislation. As a parent shopping for a bassinet, you’d certainly like to know about any hazards associated with this product. In the past, CPSC hasn’t been able to share complaint information, unless the product had been recalled, without checking with the manufacturer first. Under the new law, more general disclosures will be available at the public database of the agency’s Web site. At the meeting last week, CPSC officials noted that the opening of the database is some months away from being ready, but they say they may get it up and running ahead of schedule, which is great news for consumers.

It’s no coincidence that the Food and Drug Administration also announced this week that it will begin to list drugs whose safety is under investigation on its Web site every three months. Once again, Congress directed FDA to do it. However, while the federal safety agency will name the drug and the nature of the “adverse events,” it will not describe their seriousness or the number of complaints received, according to the Washington Post. That’s too bad, because with that information consumers can better assess the level of risk when their doctor prescribes a drug with potentially harmful side effects.

Of course, publishing such information can have a downside. FDA says that its adverse event hotline has received many reports that turned out to be false alarms. The upside, however, is that many times the full impact of side effects isn’t understood until the drug hits the market and many more people are taking it. The hope is that the public will have access to much more information on the safety and side effects of the drugs they are taking through this more open process—always a good thing for consumers.