WASHINGTON — When a 9-year-old boy accidentally swallowed several tiny round magnets in 2010, regulators turned to one of the most familiar tools in their arsenal: warning labels.
The boy wasn’t hurt, but other cases kept surfacing, sometimes forcing kids into emergency rooms. The government learned of eight more incidents that year, another 17 last year and 25 so far this year — even after launching a public-service campaign warning that swallowing two or more of the balls can damage the digestive tract.
In response, the Consumer Product Safety Commission did what it has rarely done before. It gave up on the warnings and proposed an outright ban.
The push last month to take this category of BB-size magnets off the market signals a broader rethinking of an approach that Washington has long relied on to flag the hazards of such items as cigarettes and plastic bags.
The agency also successfully pushed for a recall of 4 million Bumbo baby seats last month after concluding that the warnings on those chairs did not adequately prevent the seats from being used in ways that could result in children falling and injuring themselves.
CPSC chairman Inez Tenenbaum said she is steering the agency in a new direction by trying to prevent deaths instead of just reacting to them.
Today, warnings are so pervasive that they have become nearly meaningless in some areas, more useful in protecting manufacturers against legal liability than in guarding consumers from harm, said David Egilman, a clinical professor at Brown University’s family-medicine department who has researched industry’s influence on warnings.
“If everything you pick up has a warning on it, you’re going to instinctively ignore all warnings,” Egilman said. “That’s the real problem.”
To deal with these challenges, the CPSC sometimes asks companies to rework their warning labels or display them more prominently.
It is rare for the agency to go beyond warning labels and design fixes. That’s why the magnet issue has caused a stir. The agency is pushing to ban these types of magnets, and 11 firms that sell them have agreed to stop doing so. But two have refused, including the distributor of Buckyballs, the dominant player in the U.S. market since 2009.
Maxfield and Oberton, the distributor of Buckyballs, says it should not be penalized for misuse of its products, which are marketed as adult desktop toys. It also says the agency’s reasoning undermines its support for warnings on more dangerous items, such as balloons, fireworks and button batteries.
