Most parents believe that if their baby is placed in a baby-walker that it can freely and safely move around. The product offers a certain margin of safety to children and to a certain extent it enables parents to focus on other activities without all their attention being paid to the baby. Nevertheless, it is not so clear. Some of the baby-walkers available on the European market do not provide the proper support and enough of safety which exposes children to various risks.
Within a couple of past months, the PROSAFE (Product Safety Enforcement Forum of Europe) actively dealt with the baby-walkers safety and came with some interesting results.
The common supervisory activity focused on baby-walkers which is one of the many common activities organized by PROSAFE in 2009 included 12 Member States who actively participated. Within the activity 36 various brands and models of baby-walkers were examined with the effort to judge the degree of conformity with the European standard EN 1273 harmonized with the General Product Safety Directive (GPSD).
The tests performed on samples collected on the participating Member States’ markets detected that 19 baby-walkers (53%) is in compliance with the standard requirements. These requirements included stability (both dynamic and static), prevention against falls from the stairs, solidity of the baby-walkers, folding mechanism, minimal height of the seat the same as (if it exists) parking mechanism. Nevertheless, it was detected that at 17 baby-walkers (47%) one or more of these requirements failed.
In the Czech Republic, 3 samples in total were collected within the program. The baby-walker COLUMBIA BABY NURSE (picture is in the attachment). Within the examination it was detected that the baby-walker does not meet requirements on height of the seat. The standard requires the minimal height of the seat of 180 mm when tested in the lowest position with the weight of 12 kilograms at the seat. Within the test, the height of 165 mm was measured. This product also does not meet requirement on folding mechanism and mechanism for the frame setting. The standard requires that no possibility of unintended decomposition and degradation exists. Moreover, the product is not marked properly and is not equipped with any manual. This was why the Czech Trade Inspection issued protective measure and banned the introduction of the product to the market, ordered withdrawal of the product from the market and from use and furthermore it ordered to effectively and immediately inform consumers about the dangers so that consumers are not exposed to the product’s threats.
The market supervisory bodies at present participating in the event, act within the particular Member State and accept measures providing that products on their market are safe and risks to consumers are minimized.
Except for this, these supervisory bodies will share all measures adopted in their Member States so that they provide that all products of serious risks are despatched from the whole European market. In mid-November, a conference will be held concerning this topic where these problems will be discussed and results of this common activity will be published.