DANGER! WARNING!
Water Beads can be Toxic!
Our family established Displaynotplay to educate the public about the dangers of water beads, toxins, and product safety.
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"Age restriction and parent observation are not an effective way to prevent these SAP ingestion from occurring, as nearly half of the reported incidents occurred in school-aged children, with 30% occurring while the children were at school. Thus far, studies have reported that toys such as SAP beads to cause harm to the intestines, the external auditory canal, and as in our case, the respiratory system. We suspect that if stuck in the larynx and enlarged after absorbing water, SAP beads may result in a catastrophic sequelae. For the above mentioned reasons, we propose recalling all brands of SAP beads from markets."
https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887-020-02168-9
Please Sign Petition to protect children from water bead toys and guns on school campuses....
Report dangerous Products like water beads to the CPSC https://www.saferproducts.gov/
Our family is working to change policy and legislation so that healthcare professionals are required to call poison and report products linked to childhood injuries to the CPSC. We also want water beads to stop being marketed, advertised, and sold to children in stores and online. Educating others about the relevance of consumer product safety is a major part of what we do at Displaynotplay.com
More information coming soon...
In April 2017, my husband and I purchased water beads as a birthday gift for our 6 years old daughter Abigail. Our 10-month-old, Kipley, was not allowed to play with them. In July 2017, our baby was rushed into emergency exploratory surgery. We did not know Kipley had swallowed any beads until after her surgery. The surgeon found water bead material had created a blockage in her small intestine. Even though water beads are marketed as non-toxic, we learned the term non-toxic is shockingly unregulated in the United States.
Data for all clinically treated acute, sub-acute, and chronic injuries, as well as disease or fatalities in children caused by or connected with potential chemical exposure from interactions with toy products, are not systematically reported, analyzed, and quantified. Furthermore, the chemical composition of toys is often not readily available to customers.
The polymerization process used to create water beads is never 100%. In occupational and laboratory settings, gloves and protective equipment must be worn to avoid repeated contact with residual neurotoxin acrylamide monomers when handling polyacrylamide. Even through polyacrylamide is considered non-toxic, the polymer, must be treated with the same caution as the monomer acrylamide.
Manufacturers and retailers are not required to disclose the residual amount of acrylamide in their water bead products. Most law firms in the United States will not pursue manufacturers in China, even though most toys sold in the US are manufactured in China. Online retailers are shielded from liability for injuries caused by products sold by third-parties on their platforms, and fulfillment centers are not classified as distribution centers. In the United States, you can sue the manufacturer, retailer, or distributor for injuries incurred by defective products. In our case, we can not sue these entities.
Due to Kipley's exposure to acrylamide and the metabolic disturbances the beads cause Kipley was diagnosed with a brain injury, toxic brain encephalopathy. Regardless of the child's age, Water beads should not be used as children's toys. Water beads, known by many different names around the world, have caused fatalities, brain injuries, seizures, and major surgeries. Water beads are banned in other countries due to their threat to children. Our story is a warning I hope you hear. Water beads should only be used for display, not play.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34116666/
Data for handling polyacrylamide and acrylamide with proper safety equipment
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17QvniCJpGA1PNrKjY4y6ZJeSkaQimDZW/view?usp=sharing
https://www.edvotek.com/site/pdf/Pre-cast%20Polyacrylamide%20Gels.pdf
https://www.ehs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/lab_safety_guideline_acrylamide.pdf
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Marketing campaigns are persuasive by design, and well-intentioned professionals can fall victim to marketing claims like anyone else. Furthermore, most health care providers are not adequately trained to recognize environmentally-related risks or health problems in pregnant women, children, and adolescents. Children's Environmental Health is not standard in most medical and nursing school curricula, and medical and pediatric textbooks may only skim health topics and their relationship to environmental exposures. For this reason, the United States has 10 regional Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units (PEHSUs) and poison control centers.
Many people and healthcare professionals know about poison control centers, but have never heard of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units (PEHSUs). Supported by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), PEHSUs are a national network of experts in the prevention, diagnosis, management, and treatment of health issues that arise from environmental exposures from preconception through adolescence. Your personal healthcare professional may be very interested in knowing that they can consult with environmental pediatric professionals at these units. Your interest in this topic may encourage more and more healthcare providers to become proficient in the topic.
No! There is NO guarantee that a product labeled "non-toxic" is actually not toxic. When many people see a product labeled non-toxic, they assume that it has been tested and found free of toxic chemicals. They believe the product has a limited ability to cause harm. Many parents choose products labeled non-toxic under the assumption that they are making the smart, safe choice for their child. Most often the chemical content of toys is not readily available to consumers at the point of purchase, and physicians at point of care. Absent strict specifications about chemical content, there also may be batch to batch variation in chemical mixtures used for toys. Additionally, the chemicals used in toys may change rapidly in response to market forces, or may be protected as proprietary information. The chemicals used in toys made by smaller manufacturers, may be less well controlled and/or undocumented. Even if chemical content is consistent and recorded, toxicological information about chemicals used in toys may not be complete. Unfortunately, the belief that non-toxic equals safe causes unintentional harm. Parents, therapists, and even physicians would be surprised to know that the term non-toxic is shockingly unregulated.
The Federal Hazardous Substance Act give the Consumer Product Safety Commission authority to regulate or ban hazardous substances and toys or other articles intended for use by children, under certain circumstances to protect the public. Unfortunately the Consumer Product Safety Commission guidelines are written in confusing language. It is important for consumers and clinicians to know the term "non-toxic" is not defined by the regulation, the decision to characterize a product as non-toxic rests with the manufacturer. The Federal Hazardous Substance Act does not define the terms "non-toxic" or "non-hazardous"; manufactures are not required to preform toxicity tests; The FHSA does not require pre-market approval for products; the CPSC can not require any specific toxicity tests; and manufactures are not required to provide ingredients to the CPSC.
The view that non-toxic equals safe needs to change for the health, safety, and well-being of children. Everyone needs to understand that non-toxic equals an open question, not case closed.
https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/non-toxic-vs-toxin-free-what-do-these-terms-even-mean/
https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/pdfs/blk_pdf_chronichazardguidelines.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/1500.3
https://wastefreephd.com/2018/11/18/are-natural-non-toxic-chemical-free-cleaners-bogus/
Water beads pose an imaging and diagnostic issues in a variety of ways including but not limited too...
- You cannot always see water beads on x-ray and on CT scans, the beads often look like gas or can mimic duplication cysts of the small intestine, rather than a foreign body ingestion. You can see them on ultrasound but the beads are often missed and at times a secondary surgery can be needed to remove remaining beads hiding in another area of the digestive tract.
- The type of brain injury water beads can cause is unique. Cytotoxic cerebral edema and toxic encephalopathy are brain injuries that are not always readily visible on traditional MRI image scans. In Kipley’s case and a similar case of a 10-month-old boy in Russia, the brain injuries they suffered could not be seen on traditional MRI. Brain injuries are frequently missed, especially in children. Kipley’s brain injury was diagnosed after we left the hospital.
- Tests to identify exposure to acrylamide are not readily available to clinicians. Acrylamide and/or its metabolites are subject to enterohepatic circulation. Acrylamide, upon absorption into the blood, is rapidly distributed throughout the body with an apparent volume of distribution equal to total body water.
- Medical professionals, especially those caring for pediatric patients, need to be aware that clinical tests are not always readily available to measure chemical exposure at the point of care for all chemicals currently circulating on the toy market. A product's non-toxic label alone should not rule out poisoning from a clinician's differential diagnosis assessment.
https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887-021-02740-x
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213576620303456
https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887-020-02168-9
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34651526/
https://radiopaedia.org/articles/cytotoxic-cerebral-oedema?lang=us
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e40a/f3ac23a7ebc56c6e17120ccace01b7764e46.pdf
https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/PHS/PHS.aspx?phsid=1113&toxid=236
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0123694000000235
https://actascientific.com/ASCR/pdf/ASCR-02-0122.pdf
Historically in the US, product recalls are mainly voluntary. Congress set up the CPSC in the 1970s to work with industry rather than regulate it. The CPSC is unfortunately understaffed and under-resourced. CPSC employees are tasked with managing trillions of dollars of products. There are not enough investigators to adequately protect consumers.
Online sellers use several techniques allowed by major online retailers to escape accountability and regulatory oversight for injuries caused by their products. For example, after an injury occurs and sellers are notified, they often delete the original listing and repost the product under a different name. Sellers can also flood listings with fake positive reviews burying reviews that warn of danger. This type of behavior makes it more difficult for consumers, regulators, and researchers to see the complete picture of what harm a class of products is causing.
Currently, water beads are known around the world by different names, including but not limited too: hydrogels, polyacrylamide beads, PAM, super absorbent polymer balls, fairy orbs, orbeez refills, dinosaur eggs, rainbow balls, water balz, and dozens of other aliases. The precautionary principle is not consistently followed. Nowadays, unless a manufacturer issues a voluntary recall, several deaths occur before some products are removed from the market.
A recent study by Etayankara Muralidharan and colleagues found that for defective products that posed severe hazards, the time to recall was longer for design-related recalls and toy companies that had issued previous recalls took longer to recall toys that posed more severe hazards than those with less serious problems. For the toy industry, the conflict between public safety and business profits is particularly problematic.
https://www.reviewthis.com/mandatory-recall-magnet-sets/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296321007621?via%3Dihub
No.
"Presently, U.S. consumers who have been injured by a Chinese-made
product and are unable to bring suit against a responsible party in the United
States will not be compensated for their injury. In this regard, the U.S. legal
system has failed to provide adequate protection for U.S. consumers Manufacturers and retailers are not required to disclose the residual amount of acrylamide their toy products contain."
Major online retailers are in most states shielded from liability through section 230 even though their algorithms influence what products are promoted on their sites. And fulfillment centers are not classified as distribution centers or assemblers, so they are also protected from liability lawsuits. There is no one to sue.
https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/eilr/vol26/iss1/12/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/28/AR2007072800733.html
Water beads were initially used safely by consumers in homes without pets and children in a display capacity for agriculture and decor when handled with gloves. When trends changed, water beads fell out of fashion. To increase demand for their product, companies targeted their advertisements to children and their parents. The pivot was successful. So successful that water beads are currently used for sensory integration therapy in schools and therapy clinics even though they are banned as toys in other countries. The market has chosen to pivot in a dangerous direction. Children have suffered: hearing loss, sinus surgeries, abdominal surgeries, colonoscopies, endoscopic procedures, intestinal obstruction, intestinal perforation, brain injuries, and death.
The way to prevent water beads injuries is to stop companies from marketing them to children. We need to make it widely known that water beads can be dangerous, toxic, and poisonous. Call and email: the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, and CDC’s regional poison control centers to let them know you are concerned about water bead injuries. It is up to consumers to correct this harmful market pivot. We need to work together to prevent what happened to Kipley from happening to another child. Your help is required to prevent this tragedy from happening to other families.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bzXJsnqKUZQtT7w82Owrv3knM9H_ultX?usp=sharing
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Acrylamide
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Palus, K., & Całka, J. (2019). Influence of Acrylamide Administration on the Neurochemical Characteristics of Enteric Nervous System (ENS) Neurons in the Porcine Duodenum. International journal of molecular sciences, 21(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21010015
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