Get The Lead Out
2007-11-09 12:28:33
By:
Gene Bromberg
There's been
a lot of news lately about innocuous products that are jam-packed with dangerous chemicals. Mattel had to recall millions of toys made in China that contained high levels of lead, and just this past week it was learned that a popular toy called Aqua Dots contained a chemical that, if ingested, metabolized into a date-rape drug. That's some top-notch quality control there.
Well, the bad news keeps coming, and it
just hit the poker world. Arizona health officials are saying that Paulson
poker chips, a popular brand used in many casinos, contain extremely high levels of surface lead. How high? The EPA limit for surface lead is 0.6%. More than half the chips tested had a mark of 10%, which is as high as the test is capable of detecting. That's 160 times what the EPA judges as safe.
The CEO of the company that manufactures Paulson chips, Gerald Charlier, released a statement where he said this about the tests:
"Although testing has proven the existence of lead in the chips, the mere presence of lead is not sufficient to prove there is a health risk," Charlier said in the statement. "In fact, independent testing has also demonstrated that the simple handling of these chips would not produce any risk of health concerns to the consumer nor to the environment."
Somewhat reassuring...though the company also said in the statement that they'd changed the formulation of the chips to remove all but traces of lead.
Less reassuring is what Will Humble, an Arizona health services official who formerly headed the state's lead poisoning prevention program, had to say about the findings:
"If you were to take chips like these and spread them out, 1,000 of them on the ground, essentially it would be a federal Superfund site," Humble (said). "That's how much lead is in these things. I've been doing this for many, many years and seldom do we come across products that contain this much lead that are in people's homes."
Some of the symptoms of lead poisoning include reduced cognitive abilities, irritability, insomnia, and gasterointestial problems such as constipation and diarrhea. I think I just described about 90% of the
poker players you come across. There's no definitive proof that handling chips like these could indeed give you lead poisoning, but to be on the safe side I couldn't go around EATING them. In any case,
poker chips are known to be pretty filthy and home to a wide array of nasty micro-organisms, thanks to the fact that they're passed back and forth between people with differing opinions on personal hygiene. To be on the safe side I'd recommend you wash your hands regularly when you play and, what the heck, why not get that tetanus booster?
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