It's interesting that you bring that up, because I was just in California on a lecture tour and spoke at a number of schools and to public groups and got a real feel for what is going on down there.
Of course the warnings on proposition 65 are everywhere in California. You go fill up on gas, and of course there's a sign saying “known to the State of California” that gasoline vapours are carcinogenic. That's known only to the State of California; nobody else knows this.
The end result is that these things become invisible because the warnings are everywhere. When you cry wolf too often, nobody pays attention when the real wolf comes to the door. This is what is happening with proposition 65. Even in California they're making a joke of it, because you go into a supermarket and the labels are absolutely everywhere, saying that everything is “known to the State of California” to be carcinogenic. I see a real problem with that. When you make a warning, it has to be meaningful. It has to be meaningful, and not just because something in some dose did something in some animal.
The labelling problem is a real fly in the ointment. There's no question about that. We all, of course, want to have the best possible information. I'm certainly not against labelling. I think we need to have important stuff on that label. The difficulty is in deciding what should be on that label so that it really makes for a meaningful decision.
I don't have anything against a toy listing phthalates as an ingredient if it is known to be in there and it's a legal ingredient, which it is. Even in California, only six different phthalates have been banned. All the others are legal. Sure, put it on the label, and then let people look up what that really means. Yes, I agree with that.
The lead is a bit of a different issue, which you addressed, because lead is not put in there on purpose. Lead gets into toys in one of two ways. One is that it gets in illegally, when they're using lead-based paints, which you should not be using. The other thing is that lead is ubiquitous in the environment and it is virtually impossible to exclude it. It depends on what level you're going to investigate it at.
As I tell my colleagues, the analytical chemists, they're the root of all of our problems, because they're too good. Now they're down to parts per trillion. That's one second in 32,000 years. Or if you don't like that analogy, it's one drop of water in 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. We can find that. This is not finding a needle in a haystack; this is finding a needle in a world full of haystacks.
Now, the question is, what does that mean? Just because something is there doesn't mean that it's causing harm. The dose is very, very important, and there are doses below which the chemical does not do any harm.
The lead is a real problem because it's not supposed to be in there, so how can you label for something that should not be in there?