Last month, the Consumers Union dubbed 2007 "the year of the recall," saying a record number of dangerous foods and unsafe products had been pulled off the shelves in the United States.

"One million cribs with side rails that can separate and strangle infants, 175 million pieces of children's jewelry made with hazardous levels of lead, and 30 million pounds of ground beef contaminated with the deadly e-coli bacteria all appeared on the list of recalls for 2007," the non-profit consumer group said in a statement.

The latest massive recall came on Wednesday when 4.2 million Chinese-made toy bead sets were taken off sale because they contained a substance that has a similar toxic effect as GHB, the so-called date rape drug, when ingested.

"Children who swallow the beads can become comatose, develop respiratory depression, or have seizures," the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said.

The same day, nearly 400,000 Chinese-made toys, most of them miniature cars, were recalled for containing unacceptable levels of lead paint.

And on Thursday, 175,000 Curious George plush toys and 51,000 sets of children's sunglasses were recalled, also for having high levels of lead in their decorative paint.

Since the wave of recalls, many involving products made in China, began gathering speed this summer, consumer protection groups, officials from different states and even individuals have begun conducting safety tests on all manner of products.

Greenpeace Research Laboratories found the plastic coating of Apple iPhone headphone cables to contain "a high level of chlorine... along with phthalates plasticizers."

The phthalates found in the headphone cables are classified as "toxic to reproduction, category 2, because of their long-recognised ability to interfere with sexual development in mammals," Greenpeace senior scientist, Dr. David Santillo said on the environmental activist organization's international website.

"These phthalates are banned from use in all toys or childcare articles sold in Europe," he said.

Officials at Apple were not available for comment.

Greenpeace also tested five makes of laptop computer for dangerous chemicals. Those tests showed high levels of some potentially toxic substances in Apple and Hewlett Packard laptops in particular.

In Arizona, the department of health services issued an alert on Thursday about poker chips with potentially dangerous levels of lead.

Up to 20 million of the tainted poker chips are used in large casinos in the United States, as well as in individual homes.

Just weeks before Halloween, a hugely popular holiday with children in the United States that falls on the last day of October, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown commissioned a university chemistry department to conduct lead tests on 22 items.

The paint on three of the items, or 14 percent of the products tested, was found to be excessively high in lead.

Lead can cause damage to the brain and nervous system of children, behavior and learning problems, slowed growth, hearing problems and headaches.

It is also potentially harmful to adults, in whom it can lead to reproductive problems, high blood pressure, and memory and concentration problems, among others.

In the first half of October, more than two million products, many of them aimed at children, were recalled in the United States for exceeding the levels of lead allowed by US safety laws.

As the number of lead-related recalls has soared, kits for home lead tests have been snapped up like hotcakes.

"Our sales have increased quite dramatically," a spokesperson at Homax Lead Check said, without quantifying the rise.

Meanwhile, the independent Consumer Reports watchdog has warned that its lab tests have "detected lead at widely varying levels in samples of dishware, jewelry, glue stick caps, vinyl backpacks, children's ceramic tea sets, and other toys and items not on any federal recall list."

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