June 28th, 2011

Los Angeles Times reports:

Starting Tuesday, it will be illegal in the U.S. to sell or even donate a crib that fails to meet the toughest crib safety rules in the world.

Newly required safety tests are so stringent that few cribs in American homes — even those that have escaped recall after recall — are sturdy enough to pass them. As a result, federal regulators recommend that families that can afford to do so buy new cribs and destroy their old ones.

“I know times are tough, but I always felt like the price of a crib is minuscule compared to the price of your child’s life,” said Susan Cirigliano, a mother from New York’s Long Island who has pushed for tougher standards after her son Bobby died in a defective crib in 2004. “I was a normal mom raising her kids. Never in a million years would I have thought that could happen to me.”

Over the last four years, Tribune investigations have reported that a product supposed to be the safest item in the nursery — the one place where a parent can leave an infant unattended for hours — had become a deathtrap for some babies thanks to bad designs, defective hardware and flimsy parts.

For the rest of the story, read the Los Angeles Times