Nearly three years after 4-year-old Jarnell Brown of Minneapolis died after swallowing a trinket made of poisonous lead, new limits on two dangerous substances - lead and phthalates - in toys and children’s products went into effect this week. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act last summer. But hearing the objections of many makers of children’s products, the Consumer Product Safety Commission delayed for one year the costly testing and certification process that’s intended to keep dangerous products away from kids. Those manufacturers still have to meet the safety standards. Phthalates are a group of chemicals that have been to make plastic products softer and more flexible, such as is in pacifiers, but they have also been linked in studies to reproductive problems in laboratory animals.

This morning, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Energy and Commerce Committee was expected to put the Peanut Corporation of America on the roaster. Stoking the fire, the committee put some internal company communications on its web site this morning. Here’s one from October, in which Virginia-based company’s owner Stewart Parnell complains that the delay in shipment caused by a positive test for salmonella is “costing us huge $$$$$…” Another email, this one from January 19 (after revelations of consumers actually dying from his company’s infected products) Parnell pleads for the possibility of shipping raw peanuts from the same Blakely, Georgia factory. Given that FBI agents were swarming all over the Georgia plant this week, Parnell surprised no one by taking the Fifth and refusing to testify before the committee this morning.

The revelations give a new meaning to “Parnell’s Pride,” the brand name for a line of peanuts, peanut butter, peanut paste and other products of the Peanut Corporation of America and among the first recalled because of the threat of salmonella contamination.

Although it’s unlikely to cause the same wave of fear as the massive peanut recall, a Texas company called Exotic Meats USA is advising consumers not to eat elk tenderloin that came from a Pine Island, Minnesota, herd and was sold in Texas last month. Elk Farm LLC, a big captive herd near Rochester, came under quarantine after one tested positive for chronic wasting disease, my colleague Doug Smith reported last month. The Food and Drug Administration advises that experts don’t think humans can get chronic wasting disease (CWD) from eating infected meat. But the fact that humans can get mad-cow disease from eating infected beef “has raised a theoretical concern” that it’s possible from eating CWD-tainted game as well.

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As I’ve followed this giant peanut product recall triggered by the salmonella outbreak, I was intrigued to see a number of organic foods among the hundreds on the don’t-eat list: Health Valley Organic Peanut Crunch Granola Bars, Clif Bar’s Kid Organic ZBaR Peanut Butter, Greenwise Organic Ambassador Snack Mix, among others. So how could these products claim to be organic when they came out of the same Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Georgia, as the non-organic products that made people sick? Were these companies claiming to use organic peanuts when they really weren’t?

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