How Gov't Decided Lunch Box Lead Levels

Alexa Engelman, a researcher with the Center for Environmental Health, displays some lead-contaminated lunch bags in the center's offices in Oakland, Calif., Friday, Jan. 19, 2007. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) (Marcio Jose Sanchez - AP)

The test results also show that many lunch boxes were tested only on the outside, which is unlikely to be in contact with food. Vallese said this was because children handle their lunch boxes from the outside.

As a result of their tests, the CPSC issued a public statement last year reassuring consumers they had nothing to worry about: "Based on the extremely low levels of lead found in our tests, in most cases, children would have to rub their lunch box and then lick their hands more than 600 times every day, for about 15-30 days, in order for the lunch box to present a health hazard."

Vallese said the commission stands by those statements.

But the results were disconcerting to experts who reviewed them for the AP.

"They found levels that we consider very high," said Alexa Engelman, a researcher at the Oakland, Calif.-based Center for Environmental Health, which has filed a series of legal complaints about lead in lunchboxes.

"They knew this all along and they didn't take action on it. It's upsetting to me. Why are we, as a country, protecting the companies? We should be protecting the kids. I don't think in this instance they did their job."

Said Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.: "I am concerned that the CPSC has failed to protect children from an unnecessary hazard they have known about for some time. We should protect our children by banning lead in all children's products."

Although these test results are only now being aired publicly, the CPSC did provide them to the Food and Drug Administration last summer. The FDA's reaction was completely different from the CPSC's. In July, 2006, after receiving the test results, the FDA sent a letter to lunch box manufacturers warning them that their lead levels might be dangerously high and advising them that the FDA might take action against them because the lead would be considered a food additive if it rubbed off onto kids' lunches.

"The lunch boxes containing the lead compounds may be subject to enforcement action," said the letter.

In response to the FDA warning, Wal-Mart stopped selling soft lunchboxes with vinyl liners, and offered refunds to customers who wanted to return the ones they already had.

"The safety of our customers is always a top priority for Wal-Mart," said store officials in a written statement last summer.

Other manufacturers have recently revamped their manufacturing processes to eliminate lead, or stopped making the lunch boxes altogether. Those changes have been prompted in large part by pressure from the Center for Environmental Health and several other nonprofit advocacy groups in New York and Washington State that have been testing lunch boxes and publicly airing the results for several years.