CDC Launches New Product Safety Website

Saturday, March 19th, 2011 | Lawyer Marketing

The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s much anticipated new consumer safety website has gone public.  The website will serve as a database that contains reports from consumers about incidents and injuries involving possibly defective products.  The database will be accessible to the public, and will inject much-needed transparency into the CPSC’s current defective product recall system.

Provisions for the creation of the website were included in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.  This groundbreaking piece of legislation came in response to a number of recalls, mostly involving children’s products.  Many of these products had been recalled for excessive lead content, and others had been recalled for choking hazards.  The Consumer Product Safety Commission had been severely criticized by California plaintiffs’ trial law attorneys for its delayed response to these serious risks to children in the U.S.

Congress responded by passing the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and one of the provisions of the legislation was the creation of a federal consumer product database.  The database would be driven by consumers who filed reports of injuries and would be publicly and easily accessible to all consumers.

The new database will make the process of announcing recalls much quicker and much more transparent.  Now, consumers with a defective product can simply file a report online, and have the Consumer Product Safety Commission review the report.  If the agency finds that the report is valid, it is passed on to the manufacturer.  The manufacturer has 10 days in which to file a response.  If the manufacturer fails to do so, the complaint is posted online and made available to the public.  Now, consumers around the country can also access the database and find information about the defective product.

The launch of the database did not happen easily.  Manufacturer lobby groups pushed strongly against some of the provisions of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, including the one that gives them a period of 10 days to respond to a report.  Fortunately, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful, and the CPSC seems set on increasing consumer access to valuable product safety information.

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