Over the summer months of 2007, Mattel Inc., the world's largest toy-maker, recalled some twenty million toys, nearly three million of them because of lead-contaminated paint. The recall mushroomed into an international event. In Germany, regulators pulled some one million toys from the shelves, in Britain and Ireland, two million; countries from Malaysia and Bahrain joined the toy returns. In just one of the incriminated Chinese factories, some eighty-three different kinds of toys may have been painted with lead pigment: Thomas the Tank engine, Dora the Explorer, Sesame Street characters of Cookie Monster, Elmo and Big Bird, as well as "Sarge" and other figures based on the Disney movie Cars. Suddenly, this toxic metal, along with carbon monoxide the world's oldest recognized industrial hazard, took the western world by surprise. Despite widespread assumptions that we were safe from its clutches, a whole new vein of lead had turned up, running into our department stores, homes, and perhaps also our children.
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