14 DAY TRIAL // As many as 1,400 Halloween pirate costumes for little girls have been confiscated by the US authorities after an investigation revealed that they were contaminated with sufficient lead so as to significantly exceed the legal limits.
In plain numbers: the legal limit for lead is 100 parts per million, whereas these costumes contained 1,109 parts per million. In other words, the lead they contained was 11 times the permitted levels.
Given the fact that children more often than not tend to do more with clothes than simply wear them (i.e. they place parts of them in their mouths), it need not come as a surprise that authorities saw fit to confiscate these contaminated outfits.
Apparently, the buttons and the trim of these items of clothing were the ones that contained these dangerous amounts of lead.
Following confiscation, the Pink Punk Pirate costumes will be properly dealt with by authorities, meaning that they will be destroyed in a safe manner.
Daily Mail reports that these costumes came from China and were headed towards Seattle.
Interestingly enough, it seems that both the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and the authorities decided to have a closer look at these outfits because their importer was well known for his tendency to violate US laws.
“We target shipments for a variety of reasons. It could be the history of the shipper, the manufacturer, it could be the history of the importer or it could be the commodity itself that we’ve had prior violations with,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection told members of the press.
Just for the record, lead is particularly threatening for small children, pregnant women and elderly people, and ingesting high dosages of this chemical compound can lead to vomiting, convulsions and even coma.
As well as this, some of the children who are exposed to lead when in their infancy experience noteworthy issues when it comes to focusing on a given topic, and can even display learning disabilities.