Clinicians treating the boy suspected an
inherited metabolic disorder. So Dr. Kevin
Carpenter,
a
biochemical geneticist at the Children's
Hospital at Westmead, in a suburb of Sydney,
began checking urine samples for certain
chemicals. What he found instead was gamma
hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, a banned "date
rape" drug that can be life threatening.
Four weeks of medical sleuthing led Carpenter to the conclusion that the boy had eaten Bindeez toy beads coated with a glue compound that the boy's digestive system had converted into GHB. At least four other children have been temporarily hospitalized in Australia and New Zealand in the past three weeks after eating the beads.
The toy's distributor, Moose Enterprise of Australia, ordered a recall this week of Bindeez, which has been marketed all over the world by mail order and Internet companies and which just won an award as Australia's toy of the year. Toy stores in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore have begun taking the beads off their shelves.
Peter Mahon, a spokesman for Moose, said that the company had only recalled Bindeez beads in Australia, while ordering tests on the safety of Bindeez beads sold in more than 40 other countries, including the United States. The test results should be back within two days and a decision will be made then whether to broaden the recall, he said.
But some companies were not waiting for the results. In Britain, Amazon.co.uk abruptly stopped listing Bindeez products for sale Wednesday evening.
New South Wales, an Australian state, has even banned Bindeez, a more drastic legal measure than a recall, and has contacted 59 toy retailers to tell them to stop selling it immediately. "There are investigations in terms of how on Earth did this product - which metabolizes into a very dangerous drug - get used," said Linda Burney, the state's minister for fair trading.
Carpenter said by telephone Wednesday that safety regulators should look beyond Bindeez to conduct laboratory tests on all similar craft toys. These toys, also sold under brand names like Aqua Dots and Aqua Beads, and contain packets of brightly colored beads that children arrange into mosaics, then sprinkle with water; the beads then stick together in as little as 10 minutes to form durable artworks.
Aqua Beads are marketed by Flair Leisure Products of Britain. Peter Brown, the company's chief executive, said that the company had immediately sent Aqua Beads samples to an independent laboratory for tests Tuesday after learning of Moose's recall. The tests did not show any sign of the precursor to GHB, and while Flair does buy the beads from China, they are from a different manufacturer from Moose's and a different factory, Brown said.
The company has nonetheless begun a broader review of the product.
"We are 99.9 percent sure the product is safe, but we are conducting more tests," Brown said by telephone.
Aqua Dots are marketed by Spin Master, a Toronto-based company. Spin Master's Hong Kong office referred calls Wednesday to the Toronto headquarters, which was closed.
Hong Kong customs officials said that they had purchased Bindeez toys and sent them to a government laboratory for testing after learning that the Australian distributor had used its Hong Kong office to buy the toy from its manufacturer and ship it. GHB and its chemical precursors are banned substances in Hong Kong under the city's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance.
Moose said that it had reviewed the ingredients of the beads and found that some batches did not match the list of ingredients promised by the supplier. "The substitution was not at any time approved by Moose, nor was Moose made aware of any substitution by the supplier," the company said in a statement, adding that it would add a foul-tasting ingredient to future beads to discourage children from eating them.
Moose declined to identify the supplier. Carpenter said that during his investigation, Moose had put him in touch by e-mail with the manufacturer, whose e-mail addresses ended with "@jssy.com.hk."
JSSY Ltd. has a Web address with that name, and the company's Web site describes it as a toy manufacturer with offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan and three factories in mainland China. Lavigne Law, a customer service representative at the JSSY office in Hong Kong, said that she was not authorized to discuss Bindeez. Law said Wednesday that she would ask a colleague to return the call, but as of late Wednesday this had not happened.
Bindeez packages are labeled as being made in China. The recall comes soon after concerns about the use of lead in paint on Chinese toys and toxic industrial chemicals in cough medicine and toothpaste from China.
The 2-year-old boy in Australia, whose name has not been released, was admitted to a hospital on Oct. 5 and the urine samples had reached Carpenter's laboratory the following day.
A follow-up test two days later showed that the GHB had disappeared from the boy's body, which confirmed that the chemical had been ingested and was not occurring because of a genetic disorder. It was then that Carpenter learned that the boy had vomited beads before and after going into the shallow coma.
Carpenter obtained more of the beads with which the child had been playing and tested them for chemicals in a device known as a mass spectrometer, obtaining an unexpected result. "I saw a large peak of a substance I didn't recognize," he said.
The peak represented an obscure industrial chemical used to prevent water-soluble glues from becoming sticky before they are needed. The chemical is also a precursor of GHB; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has tried to limit public sales of the chemical, while GHB is banned entirely.
Carpenter bought a small quantity of the industrial chemical from a chemical company, a purchase that required considerable paperwork to ensure that it would not be used illegally. He contacted Moose, which referred him to the manufacturer, which provided a list of the beads' ingredients, Carpenter said.
The list did not include the dangerous industrial chemical, however. Carpenter complained that the manufacturer was also reluctant to provide details of how the beads were made.
"The manufacturer was very keen that Moose not know what was in them," apparently to prevent Moose from ordering identical beads from another manufacturer, Carpenter said.
Carpenter alerted the Ministry of Fair Trading of New South Wales. The hospital's poison control center then sent out a warning about the beads last Friday to poison centers around Australia.
The next day, a mother living near Carpenter's hospital walked in on her 10-year-old daughter and found her motionless. "The mum said at that point she thought the child was dead," Carpenter said, adding that moments later the girl began vomiting beads.
Dr. Naren Gunja, the deputy director of the center, said that "both the children presented with a coma and seizure-like movements," and added that ingesting GHB can be life-threatening because it can render the victim unconscious and unable to breathe.
Tim Johnston contributed reporting from Sydney.
