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At first it seemed innocent enough… pet food contamination with contaminated wheat gluten and imported seafood products containing high amounts of lead. Now, a large percentage of the toys our babies play with are being recalled due to lead contamination. All from China.

Excuse me, but hasn’t lead been recognized as a pathogen when ingested since about 1952? The disturbing thing about all of this is that the Chinese may have been slipping this stuff to us slowly over the past several years in the most innocent of products. You KNOW that they were aware of the health risks, yet they intentionally allowed these products to be sold to America, maybe silently hoping that we would all sicken and die. They’ve been selling us bogus drugs on the black market for years, causing untold medical complications for unsuspecting consumers from medications which have little or no active ingredients.

This situation might have appeared as an innocent mistake, had it simply involved one or two random products. There is always going to be a certain amount of inert products in almost every food source or childs toy, but it does not have to be LEAD. LEAD is a known toxin to humans, right? Even our children are taught this at an early age, or at least I was. But when a major toy manufacturer, Mattel, was recently found to be one of the poisoning culprits, we have to ask ourselves how long this has been going on before someone finally began testing these products independently. We may have been subjected to this for many years unknowingly, causing an irreversible accumulation of poisons in our bodies. This is so serious that one of the Chinese manufacturers hanged himself in back of his shop last week.

So what do we do to protect ourselves? Stop importing things from overseas? Stop the trade with other nations that prove to be poisoning our population?

No, the issue can be treated like any other breach of our homeland’s security. As products come in, they can be tested before they are allowed to be distributed to the masses. Every single boatload & plane shipment must be carefully screened in order to catch these poisons in advance. If we can screen for explosives and nuclear threats, we can also take the time to monitor poisonous food and toy items coming into our country. They cause as much death as any terrorists bomb, maybe more, and certainly on a wider spectrum. So how do we provide better control over imported products? Our governement can and should implement a screening process for all products coming into the US, and begin a trade embargo with countries who refuse to comply with safe manufacturing techniques. You bet it might hurt the economy in some regard, but we have to decide which is more important, being rich and sick, or being careful and staying healthy.

Companies in the US, such as Purina and other pet food makers, should automatically test any product that they did not personally make themselves for purity. There is really no excuse for hundred of our pets to die before the problem is found to be a food ingredient. We have gotten far too lax in our trust of other nations with whom we do trade, and corporate greed is only the beginning of the problem. For some reason, it appears that our own government has been looking the other way. I mean, really, with all we know about chemical analysis and pathogen detection, this should have been a no-brainer from the get-go. This is not rocket science, it is basic common sense not to put poison into pet food or childrens toys.

Here are some of the latest toys which are recalled due to high lead paint content:

If you know any child who has one of these toys, take the toy away immediately.

• Disney Winnie-the-Pooh Play Sets October 2007
• Baby Einstein Color Blocks October 2007
• Target Corporation Toy Gardening Tools and Chairs September 2007
• Thomas and Friends Wooden Railway Toys September 2007
• Mattel Die Cast “Sarge” Toy Car August 2007
• Mattel/Fisher-Price Toys August 2007 (includes Sesame Street and Dora toys)
• Thomas and Friends Wooden Railway Toys July 2007