REPORTS: Lead Lurking in Purses, Wallets and Sandals

Could you be a risk for lead poisoning from your handbag or wallet?

Women wear and touch them daily: shoes, purses and wallets. But do we know what's lurking in the accessories we love?

Oakland's Center for Environmental Health tested hundreds of handbags and wallets from popular Bay Area stores and found lead in purses and wallets sold at one out of four retail stores it visited, ranging from discount retailers to high end department stores.

The consumer group said it tested 300 purses and wallets. CEH found lead in 43 of the products. While there is no federal standard for how much lead is allowed in these items, hundreds of retailers pledged to limit lead to 300ppm in their products in a 2010 legal agreement with CEH. However, the report found many of them were violating their own standards.

"Lead is notorious because it impacts a child's brain and they are not able to learn as well as they would have if they hadn't been exposed to lead," said Caroline Cox, research director for the Center for Environmental Health.

"All day long you're carrying your purse, opening it, closing it. Every time you touch it, a small amount of lead gets on your fingers. Imagine yourself eating a potato chip or putting on lip balm, that lead is going into you," said Cox.

Three of the five bags tested positive for lead in amounts varying from 200 to 550 parts per million. A pair of sandals tested registered at 700 parts per million. Two of the bags had no detectable lead levels.

Cox says companies sometimes blanket all of their products with Prop. 65 warnings, just to ensure they comply with the law, but the labels don't tell people what chemical or how much of it they may be exposed to. She says the labeling can be confusing for consumers.

"It doesn't help anybody; we strongly discourage any company from [overwarning]," said Cox. "The best way to solve the problem is to just take the problem chemical out and that way you don't need the warning."

Cox says neither DD's Discounts or Big Lots has agreed to limit lead in their products, but she says CEH is constantly working to get more companies to join in the 2010 legal agreement.

We asked both stores if they were aware these products are being sold in their stores, and whether they test their products for lead.

Ross Stores, the parent company of DD's, provided a statement to NBC Bay Area saying the company is looking into the issue and it will continue selling the items in question.

Big Lots did not respond to our requests for comment.

So why are these products still being sold? In part because there are no federal guidelines for how much lead is allowed in something like a purse or a shoe.

"Even though the CPSC regulations don't currently extend to those handbags, they probably should," said toxicologist Dr. Siva Ayyar.

He says there's no scientific agreement on exactly how much is too much when it comes to lead exposure, and that ingesting lead or breathing in lead dust is thought to be more dangerous than just touching it, but, "If you can avoid it you should. There's no safe exposure level."

For shopper Charlotte Lazar, even a trace amount of lead is too much. "I think we just have to be as careful as we can," she said.-Source NBC News