JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Could a vintage, dog-eared copy of “The Cat in the Hat” or “Where the Wild Things Are” be hazardous to your children? Probably not, according to the nation’s premier medical sleuths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But a new federal law banning more than minute levels of lead in most products intended for children 12 or younger — and a federal agency’s interpretation of the law — prompted at least two libraries last month to pull children’s books printed before 1986 from their shelves.
Lead poisoning has been linked to irreversible learning disabilities and behavioral problems, and lead was present in printer’s ink until a growing body of regulations banned it in 1986. The federal law, which took effect Feb. 10, was passed last summer after a string of recalls of toys.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has interpreted the law to include books but has neither concluded that older books could be hazardous to children nor made any recommendations to libraries about quarantining such tomes, agency chief of staff Joe Martyak said Tuesday.
Still, the agency’s interpretation itself has been labeled alarmist by some librarians. “We’re talking about tens of millions of copies of children’s books that are perfectly safe. I wish a reasonable, rational person would just say, ‘This is stupid. What are we doing?’ ” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s office in Washington, D.C.
“We’re not urging libraries to take them off the shelves,” Martyak said after an earlier interview gave that impression.
Jay Dempsey, a CDC health-communications specialist, said lead-based ink in children’s books poses little danger. “If that child were to actually start mouthing the book, . . . that’s where the concern would be,” Dempsey said. “But on a scale of one to 10, this is like a 0.5 level of concern.”
