Today’s Wall Street Journal reports: “Children’s products maker Delta Enterprise Corp. will announce a recall [today] of 1.59 million cribs linked to two infant deaths, the company said, continuing a string of recent recalls of cribs and bassinets involving other manufacturers.” The voluntary recall is the result of “two different types of problematic hardware used on cribs sold from 1995 through 2005. The hardware, which includes safety pegs for one set of cribs and spring pegs for another, can create a hazard if not properly installed. The drop side of the cribs can fall and disengage, creating a gap that can entrap and suffocate infants.” The recalled cribs are not “currently in inventory at retailers, though they could be sold in secondhand stores,” company spokesperson, Jack Gutt, said. Delta’s recall “is the biggest in a recent series of crib and bassinet recalls urged” by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Earlier this year, “the agency announced a recall of about 600,000 Simplicity Inc. drop-side cribs that involved hardware problems,” and “900,000 Simplicity convertible bassinets…after federal regulators linked the products to two infant deaths from strangulation.” With the bassinet, “metal bars were spaced too far apart to prevent infants from slipping through.”
The AP (10/21) quotes Gutt as saying, “We’re erring on the side of caution. … Anyone who calls and has these cribs that were constructed in these time periods, we’re going to send anybody and everybody either additional safety pegs or the retrofit kit.”
