March 26, 2005

Candy is Dandy, But Hold the Poison

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

Imagine sweet watermelon mixed with guajillo chili powder, or a sugary paste of tamarind, citrus, and milled pepper. These are some of the flavors of candy I collected recently in San Francisco’s Mission District, and had spread before me on a table at the Atlas Cafe. Despite reports that some candies imported from Mexico were contaminated with lead, I had to try them. After sucking on a 10-cent mango and chili lollipop, which made me salivate and cough slightly, my cell phone rang. It was my friend, Rozy.

“What are you doing?”
“Sampling lead-tainted candy in the Mission,” I told her.
“What?”

When I set out recently to find Mexican-made candy that is known to contain dangerous levels of lead, I didn’t think it would be so easy. But a twenty-minute walk down 24th Street yielded six candies that have tested high for lead many times, including Super Lucas, a chili-sugar mix that the California Department of Public Health tested at 0.93 parts per million, almost twice the regulated limit of lead in candy of 0.5 ppm. In one Latino market I went to, little plastic bottles of Super Lucas were right at the check-out counter - two for a dollar.

“Can’t they regulate that stuff?” My friend Rozy asked me.

It’s not that easy.

For one thing, the lead levels in Mexican candy are inconsistent. One batch of candy may test high while another batch of the same candy tests low. This is the case with Pelon Pelo Rico, the sugary tamarind and pepper paste that sickened two-year-old Diana Lopez in Southern California, as reported by the Orange County Register, which conducted a two-year, six-part investigation of the Mexican candy business. While health investigators in Los Angeles attributed little Diana’s lead poisoning to Pelon Pelo Rico – her favorite treat – a list of tested candies sent to me by the CDPH shows the same candy testing low for lead ten times.
“You buy one candy in one place and it may be okay, but the next one will not be okay,” said Leticia Medina of the Childhood Lead Prevention Program at San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. Health officials consider Mexican chili and tamarind to be major sources of lead in imported candy. Chili and fruit are often dried outside – sometimes near factories or freeways in Mexico, where leaded fuel is still voraciously consumed and emitted into the air. Then there’s the issue of lead-based ink in wrappers that can contaminate candy, and lead-based glazes in some pottery used in candy-making.

The problem of imported candy tainted with lead – at inconsistent levels and from hard-to-pinpoint sources – does not fit neatly into the regulatory framework of any one governmental department or agency. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration could step in and require labels, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency might have jurisdiction, or the World Trade Organization could consider it a trade issue. As a result of the international nature of the problem, and the dispersion of the candies once they reach the United States, potential risks currently fall between the bureaucratic cracks.

Mexican candy makers and bureaucrats, when approached by U.S. health inspectors and journalists, say there is nothing they can do. Much of the tainted candy is made by hundreds of tiny, unregistered makers in Mexico, and is often brought into the country through less-than-mainstream distribution channels. Furthermore, it’s difficult to implicate candy in lead-poisoning cases of Latino children who, according to Leticia Medina, have higher levels of lead in their blood than any other California population group. Latinos often live in industrial areas in older housing where there is more likely to be lead-tainted soils and paints. Nevertheless, said Medina, out of a thousand cases of child lead poisoning in San Francisco County, one hundred and fifty of them are attributed to imported candy. Though the problem has caused a stir in California for more than a decade, she added, parents still buy the sweet, potential poison off the shelves. And kids love it.

Sitting in a Mission café with my red, yellow, and white rocket-shaped tube of Pelon Pelo Rico, I was like a big kid. I knew the stuff could be bad for me, but I couldn’t stop licking the spicy sugar paste that oozed from the top when I pressed on the bottom.

To find out how many kids are eating the suspect candies, Medina and her colleagues at the Department of Public Health conducted a survey recently of 300 parents and teachers in the Mission District. The results were “pretty awful”, she said, with an estimated ninety percent of Latino school children in the area eating the candy two or three times per week. The best way to change this, according to public health specialists like Leticia Medina, is public information, and collaboration.
“Things are finally starting to happen,” Medina said. The FDA and the Department of Health Services are starting to act, she said, thanks in large part to the extensive investigation by the Orange County Register, which sent reporters as far as the chili fields of Mexico. San Francisco’s Childhood Lead Prevention Program recently launched an awareness program in the Mission, consisting of bi-lingual posters - made by the OC Register - that warn of the possible dangers of particular candy. The posters – which contain information about lead poisoning and show color illustrations of certain candies - will be hung at schools and stores in Latino communities around the Bay Area.

For more information, visit:
http://www.dph.sf.ca.us/cehp/lead/lead.htm
http://www.ocregister.com/investigations/lead/
http://www.dhs.ca.gov/ps/fdb/