The AP reports that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is “urging the nation’s libraries to take children’s books printed before 1986 off their shelves while the federal agency investigates whether the ink contains unsafe levels of lead. Few, if any, libraries are complying, and many librarians are ridiculing the recommendation as alarmist. Even the nation’s premier medical sleuths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say any danger from lead in children’s books is slight.” The AP notes that the CPSC chief of staff said that CPSC “has neither concluded that older books could be hazardous to children nor made any recommendations to libraries about quarantining such tomes.”
