The problem of metal contamination in toys and children’s jewelry caught attention especially after the late 2000s due to several incidents causing serious adverse health effects for children (including death) resulting in numerous recalls of consumer goods. Although the attention from the public, media, legislators, and scientists has led to some improvements in the area, there still remains much to do. The present talk aims (1) to briefly discuss the current status of legislations on the subject, and then (2) to discuss in detail the recent advances and updates in scientific research in the field. Regarding the legislations, some minor but significant changes have taken place both in the EU and the North American regulations within the last decade. Although the testing approaches differ between individual countries, a general tendency to adopt the ISO standards for testing children’s consumer goods could be observed. At the present moment, the problem of toys and children’s jewelry contamination seems to be moving from developed to developing countries possibly due to the fact that improved regulations and enforcement in developed countries lead manufacturers of these items to look for new markets with weaker regulations and/or enforcement. Several scientific studies performed within the last decade indicate that the problem of toys and children’s jewelry contamination is still present in different parts of the world; and, that the total concentrations of toxic elements in metallic toys and children’s jewelry is higher compared to other categories of children’s items. However, it does not mean that other categories of children’s items are safe. Bioaccessibility assessment tools remain promising and thus have become more and more popular for assessing the safety of consumer goods. Generally, the correlation between total and bioaccessible concentrations observed by researchers has been weak or non-existent, therefore, it may be suggested using bioaccessibility values instead of total metal content for risk characterization as well as for regulatory purposes. For bioaccessibility measurements, two main types of tests available are in-vivo and in-vitro tools. In-vitro tests bring several advantages over in-vivo such as their speed, having easier setup, costing much less, and avoiding ethical considerations linked to animal and/or human testing. Existing research areas and challenges in the field include Ag nanoparticles in consumer goods, contamination in vintage and second-hand articles, metallic speciation and its analytical investigation, and the question of reliability of popular rapid screening methods (e.g. via XRF) over classical analytical techniques (e.g. total digestion followed by ICP/AAS).

^*This presentation is intended to be the first part of the work to be presented by Prof. Guney’s team on contamination in children’s consumer goods and its potential adverse health outcomes. As a leading field expert, with this first part, Prof. Guney would like to introduce the audience a general view of the current situation in the field.