A Tuesday Senate hearing on holiday toy safety found a massive increase in button battery-related injuries in small children last year and reviewed legislation to reduce them.
Button batteries are those small, silver, coin-shaped batteries that power a range of small devices like watches, hearing aids, television remotes, garage door openers, and more. From March to September 2020, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered a 93 percent increase in button battery-related injuries in children aged 5-9. The injuries mostly involved ingestion, but some involved children placing a small battery in their nose or ear.
During the seventh-month time period, most children were at home as Covid kept many schools closed. Their parents were likely home, too, and distracted by balancing home life, work, and, maybe, teaching their children.
“Having kids around products with coin batteries with distracted parts goes a long way to explain the increase,” Dr. Benjamin Hoffman with the American Academy of Pediatrics said during Tuesday’s hearing.
Having kids around products with coin batteries with distracted parts goes a long way to explain the increase
Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, American Academy of Pediatrics
Hoffman told lawmakers he wanted rules for manufacturers to make it as hard as possible to remove button batteries from devices. He suggested also they add a coat of a bittering agent on removable batteries so children would spit them out if ingested. Though, Hoffman said no hard data exists on the efficacy of doing so.
To add these protections, lawmakers reviewed Reese’s Law. It would create those standards to make it hard for children to access the batteries in products. It would also create new warning-label requirements to tell of the hazards of ingesting button batteries.
The proposed law is named for Reese Hamsith. The Texas girl swallowed a button battery at age one and did not live to her next birthday. Reese’s mother, Trista — founder of the child advocacy group Reese’s Purpose — told lawmakers Tuesday of Reese’s ordeal.
Trista said her daughter swallowed a button battery in October 2020. She then wasn’t “her spunky self” and a doctor diagnosed the girl with croup, her mother said.
“After returning home we noticed a button battery missing from a device,” she said. “We tore the house apart but couldn’t find it. A quick Google search had us rushing to the emergency room. An x-ray confirmed that she had ingested the battery and doctors performed emergency surgery to remove the battery.”
But the battery created a hole in her esophagus and trachea, allowing food and water into the little girl’s lungs and air into her stomach. The girl died after a surgery to close the hole in December 2020.
Lawmakers also considered the dangers of a raft of holiday toys, especially counterfeits not made to comply with safety standards, in the hearing called “Hidden Holiday Hazards: Product Safety During the Holiday Season.” Last year, 150,000 toy-related injuries and nine deaths were reported to the federal government, experts said Tuesday.
Last year, 150,000 toy-related injuries and nine deaths were reported to the federal government.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) told of a Tennessee family that bought a hoverboard as gift online. The hoverboard caught fire and burned the family’s house down. She urged manufacturers, retailers, and government overseers to closely monitor supply chains for poorly made and counterfeit toy products.
“So, these are the things that we watch out for to make certain that the supply chain is going to be safe — and as more consumers are buying from third-party platforms — that they’re going to have the insight into where these products are coming from and why these products might be unsafe,” Blackburn said.
Holiday dangers extend from toys, too, lawmakers were told, to Christmas tree lights, menorahs, and more. From 2016 to 2018, 100 Christmas tree fires and 1,100 candle fires resulted in 30 deaths and 180 injuries, according to federal data.
