Comment from Eugene Levin

Safety Standards for Play Yards (Document ID CPSC-2011-0064-0001) Adequacy of the ASTM Standard The record indicates that there are 2.9 million play yards sold every year and 2,177 fatal and non-fatal injuries associated with such play yards within a three and a half year period. Over the course of that time period, 10.15 million units were sold. Presuming there is no second hand market and that all yards were new and were assembled with reasonable care, approximately .02% of play yards have harmed children. Approximately .0017% have killed children. The extremely low incidence of injury puts into question the need for regulation at all, outside of the CPSIA mandate, as there probably is no heinous market failure. Nevertheless, it is unclear what effect the ASTM standards for new play yards may have on child injury, especially if most injuries are caused by old or second-hand products—a factor omitted in the incident data. A policy encouraging vendors or manufacturers to engage in low cost maintenance of their products may, in this case, save more lives. The incident data also does not explicitly state that the play yards that caused injury were from the nine firms that are not compliant with the ASTM. Many of these firms may very well have been compliant, their products containing the sorts of defects addressed by the new ASTM 406-11. If that is the case, rate of injury should drop sharply in the coming years and the policy is reasonable. But if it is not, and injuries persist even with ASTM-compliant yards, then using the ASTM as a policy foundation would be misguided. The incident data does not indicate which of these two possibilities is more plausible. Additional Warnings With respect to certain warning considerations, unsafe infant sleep or placement practices are not necessarily a causal consequence of the construction of the play yard—the presence of harmful devices, or orienting infants in positions hazardous to their health, is a product o