The Washington Post reports that in response to an incident in which “a 9-year-old boy accidentally swallowed several tiny round magnets in 2010,” regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission have increasingly been considering bans on certain products in addition to warning labels. The concern among many product safety regulators is that with so many warning labels on so many different products, consumers may pay less attention to the labels. According to the Post, “CPSC Chairman Inez Tenenbaum said she’s steering the agency in a new direction by trying to prevent deaths instead of just reacting to them.” As the article notes, “the push last month to take this category of BB-sized magnets off the market signals a broader rethinking of an approach that Washington has long relied on to flag the hazards of everything from cigarettes to plastic bags.”
From the American Association of Justice news release.
