Fisher-Price, a subsidiary of the recall-prone Mattel corporation, recalled nearly 11,000,000 products today in one of the most widespread children's product recalls in U.S. history.

Recalled products include:

• Over 7 million plastic Trikes and Tough Trikes sold under Hot Wheels, Barbie, Kawasaki, Tough Trike, Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Diego names, for impact hazards associated with a protruding fake key;


• About 120,000 Little People Wheelies Stand 'n Play Rampway toys, for laceration hazards;


• Over one million Healthy Care, Easy Clean and Close to Me High Chairs, for laceration hazards; and


• Nearly 3 million infant toys with inflatable balls, for choking hazards.

Click the links above for specific instructions regarding fixes and remedies. Mattel is offering to send kits for you to repair some products yourself, and replace others with different toys that you did not choose to buy. Such a deal.

Mattel's toys, including the Fisher-Price brand, were granted an exemption from third-party safety testing by the Consumer Product Safety Commision. Z Recommends has publicly opposed this policy as a conflict of interest on the part of Mattel, a failure of enforcement by the CPSC, and a policy that would result in hazardous toys being sold to U.S. consumers. As we wrote in an April 2010 post entitled "Why we have so little confidence in the safety of Mattel products":

Unless and until the CPSC gets its act together and holds Mattel accountable for third-party testing, all Fisher-Price products - as well as products by any other subsidiary or brand of Mattel that cannot demonstrate to us that they are committed to independent, third-party lab testing for their products - will be flagged as Low confidence in the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products. For consumers who rely on the guide for information about whether we consider a product to be safe, it's the best red flag we can wave for products for which we lack proof of known hazards, but which cannot demonstrate to our satisfaction that their products are safe for your children.

Our policy stands, and we reiterate: Until Mattel is required to test its products in accredited, independent, third-party laboratories, we will avoid recommending Mattel products wherever we find them, and advise consumers to treat such products as equivalent to untested imports. In the meantime, we encourage you to let Mattel know what you think about their safety standards at (800) 432-5437 between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, and to let the CPSC know what you think of their sweetheart deal with Mattel at (800) 638-2772.

A few readers have written in to ask for a PayPal payment option for our project fundraising for ZRecs testing of SIGG and Pampers Dry Max. Anji writes:

Would you be able to add Paypal to the payment options? I'd love to contribute a bit to each project. My sister and many friends and family use Pampers, (I use cloth at day and Huggies Supreme at night), and am always looking for the best option for drink containers. Not to mention, I appreciate EVERYTHING you guys do!!!! But our credit card is maxed, and the e-check thing is very unfamiliar to me. I pretty much only spend online, if I can debit from our bank account with Paypal, which is essentially no different from using my debit card for everything else I pay for in real life. Thanks!

Happy to oblige! We will suggest to our fundraising host that they add a PayPal payment gateway, but in the meantime, you can donate to either our Pampers Dry Max Skin Reaction Testing or our SIGG EcoCare Liner Flake Testing via PayPal, click this donate button:

There is a "special instructions" field you can use to specify whether you'd like your donation to go to the Pampers testing or SIGG testing or both; you can also leave it blank and we'll use it to fund whichever project is in greatest need. We will probably turn around and donate the money into the fundraising page on your behalf, so everyone still has a sense of our real progress towards our goal - even if this means losing another small percentage that the fundraising host charges for donations.

If, on the other hand, you're happy to pay by credit card or e-check, you can do so directly through any of the SIGG or Pampers links above, where you can also learn the background and goals of each project.

Thanks to those who have donated so far - and to everyone considering a donation, we hope this PayPal option makes it that much easier to help us do more to help you!

So, we had an idea.

We frequently come across consumer issues that require some hands-on research. We work hard, and sometimes even spend a little of our own money in the process. Sometimes readers do, too - spending their own money to ship things to us, sending us photographs, dissecting diapers. What we do already feels like something of a team effort, and we get a lot done. When the cost of research (buying a product here or there) is low, it all works out; we make a little money from our blogging, and readers' frequent willingness to send us a product at their own expense is a sign of just how passionate ZRecs readers are about bringing out the facts on issues that matter to them. But there are also projects that are simply beyond our financial means to justify, times when we could do much more if consumers pooled their resources to do something ambitious.

What if, we wondered, instead of going hat in hand to ask readers to contribute to a general fund to fuel our consumer reporting (not that there's anything wrong with that), we could actually pitch specific research projects to our readers and ask them to fund them if they are interested in seeing us conduct them?

Yes. That got us very excited indeed. Would it work? We weren't sure. But we wanted to find out. And here we are.

Pampers and SIGG

We have two proposals for your consideration. Both are timely, and both have practical benefits to consumers as well as an investigative, "let's-find-out-the-real-truth" bent. Both will, if funded, offer both useful consumer information that will be collected no other way, and a shot at consumer justice.

If you have been touched by either of these potential product issues - burned by a product that harmed your family or just your pocketbook, please consider donating to make these projects a reality. We don't claim to be scientists, but we do claim to be thorough, credible, transparent, and objective.

• Pampers Dry Max Skin Reaction Test: Will Dry Max diapers cause a more serious skin reaction than previous Pampers diapers?


• SIGG EcoCare Liner Test: Does SIGG's new, BPA-free liner still chip away from bottles, even though the company declares that this "cannot happen"? (Click through for details)

Each pitch linked above includes a background on the problem, a proposal for a specific experimental test, a breakdown of project costs, and a form to fill out if you would like to donate. For our Pampers research project, you can even donate on behalf of someone else and send them an e-card.

We won't lie to you - we are using these two projects to pilot our idea for making engaging, grassroots consumer research a reality. We have even bigger projects than these in mind for future research, including some that would require outside experts, laboratory testing, or whatever else is necessary to create movement where there is stagnation in public discourse on consumer issues.

I guess what we're saying is, if you get the gist of where we're going with this and what the future possibilities might be, and you're saying to yourself, "This is brilliant and exciting! I totally trust ZRecs to do this and I want to read about it!" then we encourage you to seriously consider helping to give these specific projects - as well as this broader idea - a future at Z Recommends. These are our pilot projects that will prove whether we've touched on a viable model for getting direct consumer funding for consumer research that can impact not only your consumer intelligence but public debate and awareness.

A bit of fine print:

• Donors of any amount will have the opportunity to sign up for exclusive email content documenting our projects in progress and get early notification of our results, before they're published on ZRecs. Donate once and you can receive the updates as long as you want.


• If we cancel the project for underfunding, or if events change and testing is no longer needed (even the prospect of a project getting funded and conducted could spur a company to act where it might otherwise choose not to), donors will be offered the option of allowing us to use their donation for another project, or receiving a full refund.


• Donations are not tax-deductible. Our current organizational structure is an LLC, not a non-profit. We will consider non-profit status for our "research unit" if this takes off, but at the moment it feels premature.

Like this idea? Then read our Pampers Dry Max or SIGG project pitches and see what moves you. And if you have any problems with the donation form, please let us know at zrecsmedia {at} gmail {dot} com.

Thanks for your support and readership! Someone has already chipped in for the Pampers Dry Max testing - care to join them?

Editor's note: Thanks to generous donations from concerned parents, we've done our own amateur skin patch testing of Pampers Dry Max diapers. You can learn what we discovered here.

Now that we've discussed how and why Pampers brought Dry Max into the world and made an argument for three ways Pampers is understating the Dry Max problem, we're ready for the third installment of our four-part investigation into Pampers Dry Max. In this post we will address differences we see between Dry Max and the previously sold Pampers diapers, and how the reformulation might create potential hazards that could explain the widespread reports we are seeing online of unusually severe rashes associated with the use of Dry Max diapers.

Dry Max is different, unless that bothers you

Throughout the nearly month-long debate over the safety of Pampers' new "Dry Max" diaper design, Procter & Gamble has walked a tightrope between two contradictory claims.

The first of these ideas is that Dry Max is profoundly different than previous diapers, that its impact is significant and meaningful to consumers and that it represents a technological advance that makes Pampers stand out from its competition.

The second is that any criticism or questioning of Dry Max technology is either naive and misinformed, or vindictive and self-serving, because Dry Max is similar to previous diaper designs in every meaningful way.

As we have watched the drama unfold - first with mainstream media attention, then with government regulators and plaintiff's lawyers getting involved - Pampers has shifted from one to the other of these claims as it dealt with competing constituencies, placating mothers with "all we did was" while crowing to the press that they have invented the future of disposable diapering, then going into damage control mode and mixing up their messages even further.

This yin-and-yang approach to a product launch is remarkably flexible; given the position of perpetual cultural amnesia from which major newsmakers engage with transitory public stances of corporations, Pampers may, if forced, abandon one of these themes entirely for the purposes of self-preservation, and call the other a public misreading of their corporate message. For the moment, however, the company is maintaining that they have created a game-changer without breaking any of the old rules. Our task today is to take a closer look at these new diapers and, in the process, address that apparent paradox.

How (most) disposable diapers work

To examine the diapers with us, you'll need to become an armchair expert in disposable diapering, a ZRecs-acquired skill that will serve you well alongside your abstruse knowledge of bisphenol-A leaching levels, your ability to identify unlabeled plastics and their associated properties, and your familiarity with drop-side crib politics. Once we're all up to speed with our newly-acquired knowledge of disposable diaper engineering, we'll compare Pampers Dry Max to the company's previous design in a comparative diaper dissection, to see what clues we can find to identify what might be causing such serious reactions in babies.

A disposable diaper is like a miniature aquifer designed to channel and control the flow of human waste.

In the typical disposable diaper, a top layer of plastic, or "nonwoven fiber," is treated with a surfactant that helps draw liquids into the diaper and away from the skin, and this one-sided coating also makes it more difficult for those liquids to come back out. The chemical composition of this surfactant is not publicly shared. Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) are available only to those buying the chemical (like Pampers).

A hydrophobic (water-resistant) material, typically polypropylene, is used around the leg cuffs and at the top of the diaper, to discourage liquid from exiting the diaper.

An "acquisition and distribution layer," or ADL, creates a path that shifts liquids from areas where the liquid is most likely to be deposited towards other areas of the diaper.

Wood pulp (cellulose, also called "fluff pulp"), typically from U.S. pine sources, is layered below the ADL as an "absorptive core" to store the liquid, with small pieces of sodium polyacrylate, a superabsorbent polymer, mixed into the pulp.

Since the introduction of SAPs in the 1980s, manufacturers have played with the ratios of these two absorptive materials, as each has its own benefits. The pulp, which actually absorbs liquids into the capillary spaces between the fibers, naturally distributes liquids throughout its mass, and can hold several times its weight in liquid. But the liquid also squeezes out of the capillaries when the cellulose is put under pressure (which a baby is constantly doing from one angle or another, whether sitting or lying down), which means liquid can be pushed back through the hydrophilic top layer or leak out the sides of the diaper.

To simplify the chemistry involved, SAPs like sodium polyacrylate are curled up in their dry state and have salts hanging onto them. When exposed to liquid, the salts dissolve, the sodium polyacrylate chain unfurls, and the hydrogen in water molecules takes the place of the salts, thus becoming "locked" to the SAP. Polyacrylates are "cross-linked" to create longer chains and help distribute wetness along their length.

Sodium polyacrylate can hold much more liquid in suspension than wood pulp can, forming a three-dimensional gel-like structure, but it isn't as "cooperative" as fluff pulp - it isn't able to shift liquids around to areas that are not yet saturated as easily as fluff pulp.

The diaper is finished with a backing layer (the outside of the diaper) made of polyethylene or another plastic.

Layers of the diaper are glued together with "hot melts," mixtures of resins and oils derived from wood and/or petroleum-based sources. These adhesive cocktails are applied to the plastics in a molten state, and their composition is also a closely guarded trade secret. Again, Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) are available only to those purchasing the actual materials from chemical companies.

So there's your crash course. Now we can look at the diapers, and identify both what has changed and what hazards it might expose infants and toddlers to that could be behind these rashes. Ironically, many parents whose children have not had reactions to Pampers Dry Max diapers are also frustrated by them, based on how they function; this no doubt makes up a significant portion of the social media advocates clamoring for a return to the previous design. We'll address some of those criticisms along the way.

Dissecting the diapers

Pre-Dry Max diapers are a rare commodity these days; since Pampers began gradually substituting the old diapers for the new ones a year ago, we are now at a point in the transition when diapers appear on many store shelves both with and without the Dry Max seal and marketing information, but contain the same reformulated diapers. So when we learned that Alexis (one of yesterday's two Dry Max case studies) still had some of the old Pampers Cruisers on hand, we quickly asked her if she'd do a side-by-side dissection of the two versions of the diapers. Here's a breakdown of what has changed in both Swaddlers and Cruisers; you'll find these changed diapers both in boxes labeled as "Dry Max" and boxes that look like they should have the old version of the diapers in them.

Below are two versions of Pampers Cruisers, side by side. The lefthand diaper is a Pampers Cruiser with the mesh lining from about April 2009, size 4. Alexis has had it in a storage bin (along with outgrown baby clothes) since that time. On the right is a Pampers Cruiser, size 5, from a recently opened package. Many parents, including Alexis, have reported to us that these diapers are much stiffer than the previous ones, and (at least on the exterior) are rougher to the touch.


Here is what the two diapers look like when opened. Note the color difference between the two diapers.




The removal of the mesh liner, shown in the older diaper, above, is one of the biggest non-rash complaints parents have expressed about Dry Max diapers. The liner was designed to contain bowel movements, keeping them from leaking up the back of the diaper and controlling their spread throughout the diaper's interior. Note its absence below.


In the photo above you can see that the color in the interior of the Dry Max diaper is not from a dye on the skin-contact surface of the diaper, but is inside. Is the color present in both, but simply showing through better when there's less fluff pulp? Alexis cut open the two diapers to separate the inside layers and see what's going on in there.


With the image below, we arrive at the other key functional criticism parents have of Dry Max diapers: Pampers put total faith in its superabsorbent polymer for the back section of the diaper, and removed all fluff pulp. Hello, BMs up the back.


Here is the inside of the old design of the Pampers Cruiser, and here's where your new disposable diaper engineering knowledge starts really coming in handy:


From right to left (interior to exterior) we see the mesh liner, the acquisition and distribution layer, the fluff/SAP layer, and the backing. The hydrophilic layer might be classified as the mesh itself, or the outermost portion of the ADL.

With your newfound knowledge of disposable diaper engineering, you should now see that the above represents a significant departure from the layering you'll find in every diaper that competes with Pampers.


First, there is no acquisition and distribution layer at all. There is a top layer that brings the liquid in, and then a thin layer of fluff pulp that is itself affixed to a backing layer with a markedly different color.

The sodium polyacrylate SAP used in Pampers Dry Max diapers is actually adhered to the bottom layer of the diaper. "It was difficult to remove the pulp from the new version of the diapers," Alexis reports. "I was scraping it with my nails…but managed to remove most of it. These did not have the numerous layers like the mesh diaper did. Really had to pry these apart."

The main benefit to this is that it can then be distributed in a pattern and held in place, rather than mixed into the fluff pulp in a uniform distribution. Thus specific areas of the diaper can have more or less, in theory reducing the need for an acquisition and distribution layer to channel liquid to different areas of the diaper.

We believe the Dry Max absorptive core is made in one of two ways: Either an additional (and no doubt differently formulated) hot melt adhesive is used to affix smaller particles of sodium polyacrylate to the backing layer of the diaper, or the acrylic acid used in the production of sodium polyacrylate was itself affixed to the diaper, and then polymerized on the material itself. We'll explain a bit more about that in a minute, but suffice to say this is the area of the diaper that has changed the most and is the most likely possible cause of the "extreme rashes" parents are reporting after using Dry Max diapers.

Here's the amount of wood pulp found in each diaper.




As shown above, some of the beads of SAP can be separated from the fibers in the old version of the diaper. None can be separated from the Dry Max diaper, because they are not mixed in with the fluff pulp.

Possible sources of the problem

What follows is our shortlist of the changes that could potentially cause a child wearing a Dry Max diaper to have a significantly more serious and debilitating diaper rash than experienced with most diapers. Everything else in this post - the explanations of how diapers work, the teardowns - have been leading up to this, so feel free to reference the above as we discuss these potential hazards.

1. The missing mesh liner

Why did Pampers remove the mesh liner? The company's public explanations of the change dismiss the liner as "unnecessary," but surely it was put there for a reason. Was it really removed just to make the diaper thinner?

We'd like to propose an alternative possibility: The reliance on SAP and a small amount of fluff pulp without the use of an acquisition and distribution layer was incompatible with the layer of mesh; the hydrophilic top layer just didn't love water enough to successfully draw wetness away from the skin and/or far enough into the diaper, or the mesh layer interfered in some other way with the manner in which the liquid could best be distributed using a SAP-coated backing layer. Removing the mesh layer puts the baby's skin directly in contact with the top layer (treated, remember, with a surfactant), which could change the chemistry of the diaper-to-skin contact considerably from the old to the new diaper.

2. The hot melt adhesive

If the SAP is directly applied to the backing of the diaper, it seems likely that Pampers had to turn to an additional adhesive in order to attach the SAP to the backing layer; if the color is a guide, the design uses it quite liberally. Adhesives have long been a suspect ingredient contributing to diaper rashes, particularly because they are present in large quantities at the elastic leg cuffs of the diapers and this is a common area for diaper rash to spread from. We have no idea what the adhesive that Pampers has added actually is, but it could be derived from either wood or from petrochemicals, and is clearly a new substance in a diaper that has raised concerns with consumers for causing severe diaper rashes. There is also less fluff pulp to potentially shield the skin from whatever is on that bottom layer. Also, if the extent of the adhesive is indicated by the presence of the bluish color that is absent from the old Pampers diapers, this material is also present in the leg cuff areas of the diaper, further extending the potential area of exposure.

3. Fragrances

Pampers has stated in private emails to consumers that "small amounts" of "masking perfume" are "Added between the core and backsheet to mask the natural odors of diaper ingredients." Many parents (with or without infant rash issues) have complained about Dry Max diapers having a very strong chemical smell. If this odor comes from the sodium polyacrylate or the adhesive now used in the backing layer, it is possible that a larger amount of fragrances are used in an attempt to mask a stronger chemical smell. These fragrances might be irritating to the skin and lead to more severe rashes.

4. Acrylic acid

Sodium polyacrylate is made of acrylic acid that is polymerized using any of a number of other chemicals. Although Pampers officials have stated that they are using the same superabsorbent polymer they've used in the past (and admitted separately that sodium polyacrylate is indeed what they use) it is possible they are polymerizing the acrylic acid using a different chemical. Since polymerization of any substance is by definition incomplete, traces of the nonpolymerized substances remain in the material.

In addition to potential irritation from a new polymerization agent, if Pampers is polymerizing the acrylic acid on the backing layer itself rather than applying already produced sodium polyacrylate, the polymerization might result in differing levels of residual acrylic acid, or in acrylic acid being left in the material of the diaper, which could then mix with urine and create a more acidic environment in which diaper rash might be more severe. Sodium polyacrylate itself is classified as a non-toxic chemical, but acrylic acid is corrosive. Infant and toddler skin might have differing abilities to adjust to this higher level of acid.

5. Excessive dryness

Pampers have promoted Dry Max diapers as being "their driest ever," and discussions of diaper rash cite moisture against the skin as the leading cause of diaper rash. However, many parents who have reported severe diaper rashes with the use of Dry Max diapers (like Casey's story discussed yesterday) tried more frequent changes to see if it would solve the problem, and it failed. Could it be that the power of so much SAP being used in a diaper makes a baby's skin too dry? This might be consistent with the raw, cracked, and bleeding skin described by many Dry Max users.

We have other theories of possible hazards, but the five areas above are the ones we feel are most plausible, based on our research and understanding of the issue to date. Our point in presenting them is to show how simplistic statements like "we have not changed the superabsorbent polymer" or "we have not added any chemicals" are insultingly simplistic.

Conclusions

We believe that the most reasonable explanation for what is happening is that something in the design or materials used in Dry Max diapers are likely to be causing a dramatically increased severity of diaper rashes among users. We believe this because we believe mothers (and their doctors) can tell when a diaper rash is significantly worse than what a child has had previously, and believe that there are many cases in which linking causes and effects are far less complex than interested parties might like us to believe.

We base our opinion on our long-term reporting on how toxins introduced from multiple environmental sources can contribute to larger and longer-term health effects. We also suspect that in at least some cases individuals exhibiting allergic responses to products may be the "canaries in the coal mine" that alert us to underlying exposures that some of us do not exhibit symptoms of, but may be affected by nonetheless. We have no way of knowing if Pampers Dry Max is such a product or not, so have focused our reporting on what might be causing the symptoms described by parents using Pampers Dry Max - namely, more serious diaper rashes than they have seen with competing brands or, most tellingly, after switching from the previous version of Pampers to the Dry Max formulation.

We are not doctors, and our opinions should not be substituted for medical advice. That said, we believe that the best solution for any parent is to avoid Pampers Dry Max diapers - if not now, then when it's time to buy diapers again.

In our fourth and final installment of this series, we'll discuss the social media component of this story and its implications for the future of consumer activism and consumer research, as well as the future of disposable diapers.

Update: An update and safety note, and the results of our own in-home skin patch testing of Pampers Dry Max diapers.

Miss a previous installment of this series? Read Part 1 and Part 2.

In our last post, we discussed the history of disposable diapering in the United States, and how Dry Max represents a new spin on a trend Pampers has been pushing for a quarter of a decade. But the heart of this issue, for us, is in defining the problem and advising parents based on what we see. So it's time we got to the heart of the matter. What is it that Pampers Dry Max diapers appear to be doing to some of the infants and toddlers who wear them that goes so far beyond "everyday" diaper rashes that parents speak out, form groups to help spread the word, and demand a product recall? Is it even possible that a company would invest millions of dollars in pushing an idea so far that it can cause significant harm?

We had planned to cover both that topic and our diaper teardown and analysis in a single post, but we get into a LOT of detail in our teardown and analysis, and we've also seen a lot of push back from Pampers in the media regarding whether or not potential problems with Dry Max are even a legitimate issue for discussion. (They are "insulted.") Because of this, we've decided to dedicate a full post to what appears to be happening to kids, and how Pampers is spinning it, before we publish our analysis of why all of this might be happening. Defending the existence of a problem in the same blog post as the level of analysis we are bringing to bear just wasn't working. So what was conceived as a three-part series will now be four, although I promise we'll have the third installment - the teardown and diaper analysis - up sometime Wednesday. [Update: Part 3 is now online.]

Three ways Pampers' assessments minimize the problem

Pampers' defense against claims that diaper rashes have become a bigger problem with the introduction of Dry Max rely on internal documentation collected by the company and now shared, presumably in full, with the Consumer Product Safety Commission for the government's investigation. There are, however, some significant problems with their defense.

1. Diapers versus consumers

Until about a week ago, Pampers claimed they had received two complaints for every million diapers sold. This figure was presented as a "normal" level of complaints.

A million diapers is a lot of diapers. But let's not confuse diapers with consumers. We encouraged Casey, a reader we'll introduce you to later in this post, to estimate how many Dry Max diapers she used before discontinuing them; she tallied up an estimate of 360 diapers, including the period when she did hourly changes to try to address the problem. Based on the report of Alexis, whose story we'll also share, we'd assume she used one full package before switching brands. 100, 150 diapers.

Here comes a little guesswork - it could be off by a little or a lot, but is used to make a point independent of the actual figures.

If Pampers began introducing Dry Max diapers into the disposable diaper stream about a year ago, and admits to having done it since last August, we might assume that that date was the point when they were selling Dry Max diapers almost exclusively. Let's also estimate that the average child (averaging newborns to toddlers) uses somewhere around 150 diapers a month. That means a parent whose child was not suffering from a debilitating diaper rash - the level that would cause them to discontinue use of the diaper and switch to another brand - would have bought an average of 150 diapers a month for nine months, or 1350 diapers, while a parent whose child did have such a reaction, and discontinued use, did it after purchasing somewhere between 100 (a reasonable average number of diapers in a single package) and 400 diapers.

See what we're driving at? The implication of a figure like "two complaints for every million diapers sold" is that the ratio of satisfaction to dissatisfaction is 1:500,000. But if you consider that during this period satisfied customers are likely to have purchased far more diapers than those whose children suffered significant harm - in our example, anywhere from 3.5 times to nearly 14 times as many - you get a very different picture of the impact. That's because the reported number of incidents is the same, but the total pool had been wildly exaggerated.

If you go to a restaurant 14 times and I go once, and I complain about the service, the restaurant manager could conclude that everything is fine because only one out of every fifteen meals served resulted in a service complaint. If this occurrence were scaled up, however, he'd be a fool to think that this record makes him a shoe-in for the local "Best Restaurant" poll.

(And don't forget [thanks, Sarah!] that treating complaints as an indicator of the extent of any product safety problem disregards anyone (everyone) whose child experienced an unusually serious rash but did not call to complain. How many consumers a single complainant represents is an open question in product safety circles, and varies depending on the circumstances, but the answer is certainly not "one." Through research, surveying, and mathematical modeling, companies that wish to know such things are able to develop reasonable estimates.)

2. Inconsistent numbers

Two weeks ago, Pampers was stating they had had "no increase" in complaints of rashes than with their previous designs, and cited a rate of two complaints for every million diapers sold as proof. Here is one of several references made to that figure:

The Consumer Product Safety Commission said last week it is probing reports about babies and toddlers suffering severe diaper rashes and blisters from the new, thinner diapers. P&G responded that the claims were "completely false" and that it has received fewer than two complaints about rashes for every million Pampers sold. [Link]

Jodi Allen, president of Pampers' North American division, who has been making the rounds and engaging consumers directly on the question of Dry Max rashes, repeated this figure in an interview with Advertising Age:

At any given time, 250,000 U.S. babies have diaper rash, Ms. Allen said. But P&G has gotten only two reports for every million among the 2 billion Dry Max diapers it’s sold so far. While it’s not dispatching teams to every home that reports a rash, P&G is doing extensive follow-up calls when it gets complaints and inviting some parents to visit a pediatrician on the company’s dime to explore the problems. [Link]

A few days ago, however, spokesperson Bryan McCleary began using a different figure. We noticed it first in an article published by the French wire service AFP:

"Two billion Drymax have been sold," said McCleary. "America has voted with their purchases.

"We saw a big increase in sales, a big increase in consumer acceptance... they will be appearing in other Pampers markets soon."

He said complaints about the diapers were not above normal levels of one per five million sold. [Link]

McCleary repeats it again in an interview with Business Week:

P&G spokesman Bryan McCleary said in an interview that the company has found no evidence that the diapers cause rashes or burns and that P&G has received one rash complaint for every 5 million Dry Max diapers sold -- about 400 complaints so far. [Link]

Those figures differ by a factor of ten, folks. In other words, for every ten complaints Pampers admitted to in articles published on May 10 and May 13, they are now admitting to one. Meanwhile, the estimate of Dry Max diapers sold (two billion) has not been altered.

So... what happened between May 13 and May 15 that could possibly cause a company to scale back its own internal estimates of harm by a factor of ten, never publicly correcting or referring to the discrepancy and pushing forward with their new numbers as though nothing had changed?

Oh yeah.

3. Numbers versus severity

Inconsistent statistics and misleading expressions of them are certainly frustrating, but even they are not the biggest problem with Pampers' public analysis of what is happening in homes that use Pampers Dry Max. The elephant in the room is the reason why the parents who are angry with Pampers are as angry as they are, and it is probably a contributing factor in why, if a product engineering problem existed, it might not be fixed in the product testing phase. It is also something so blindingly obvious it is very strange to us that no major news organization has yet made mention of it.

Pampers has publicly relied exclusively on the number of diaper rashes that are occurring, without considering their severity. They have stated that they have not received complaints or calls at a more frequent rate than with the old diapers. Even if we are willing to suspend our disbelief and accept these numbers (see #2, above), it does not follow that a similar number of diaper rashes, of much greater severity, would not represent a product defect, a problem that needs to be addressed, or a significant hardship for infants and their families.

We suspect that Pampers does not even collect information regarding the severity of diaper rashes, as doing so would be a complex undertaking and create potential product liability issues. If this is true, it means that Pampers has no data regarding how severe diaper rashes from Dry Max diapers are compared with their old diapers or with competing brands, and they have given no indication that they believe such knowledge would be beneficial or would affect their belief in their product's quality. Which is ridiculous.

Two tales of Dry Max rashes

As in the case with Carter's tagless clothing, it looks to us like we're dealing here with an irritant that causes contact dermatitis in some but not others; that the non-universality of effect causes some reasonable people with good intentions to question its reality; and that the "diaper rash" it produces is likely to be so severe that it is the worst the child has ever experienced and, in many cases, the worst the parent has ever seen.

To illustrate what appears to be happening, we'd like to share two stories with you. Like so many consumer accounts of unusual diaper rashes experienced with Pampers Dry Max, in both of these cases parents were using reformulated products that were not labeled as having been changed - and, in fact, were sold in packaging still advertising product features (such as a mesh liner) that were no longer present.

ZRecs reader Alexis and her then sixteen-month-old daughter had their first encounter with Pampers Dry Max over a year ago, in March 2009. Here is Alexis' story:

[My daughter's daycare] called my husband on a Friday saying that she had broken out in a horrible diaper rash and that we should come and get her from school. She had an awful red, bumpy, rough diaper area and swollen redness from her belly button to the small of her back. Part of the rash was a really bad yeast rash but the other part looked how your skin looks after you skin your knee. It was very painful and she screamed every time I used a wipe or even a cloth diaper rinsed with warm water on her bottom.

The pediatrician's office was closed but we called the on-call doctor who said it sounded like an allergic reaction. I was confused because she had not eaten anything different, no new lotions or creams, nothing. And she had no rash in the morning when I changed her.

We had just opened a new box of diapers and brought them to the daycare that morning. They were the same brand of diapers we'd been using since day 1 - Pampers. Upon closer inspection I found that the mesh liner that we had come to love with Pampers (and is why we paid so much money for the darn things) had been removed. Also, the new diapers were as stiff as a board and she leaked out of every single one out of the box, before we had realized this is what caused the reaction.

Alexis' daughter recovered fairly quickly; they went to their pediatrician, who prescribed multiple oatmeal baths, Benadryl, and three different topical creams. But it seemed clear to Alexis, and seems reasonably clear to us, that her daughter had a sensitivity to the new diaper that she did not have to the old version. In our view, even parents whose kids haven't reacted to Pampers Dry Max should be able to accept that.

But compared with many consumer stories about these diapers, Alexis and her daughter were pretty lucky. After reading our initial warning about Pampers Dry Max, reader Casey wrote in. We have read and received many accounts which share many of the characteristics of Casey's, but hers offers a couple of insights you won't see in some: A frank admission of how difficult it can be to identify a problem when you are using a product you have learned to trust; and how guilty a parent can feel after realizing that their child's suffering could have been avoided "if only" they had put the pieces together sooner.

We have been Pampers users since Kael, my 4.5 year old, was born. Even when we used cloth during the day, we used Pampers at night. I say this, because when we were doing what we thought was "trying everything" to get rid of the rash, we did not switch diapers for a very long time. I assumed Pampers were the diapers, and because of our previous experiences with them, I never once assumed it could be the diapers that were causing the problems.

Somewhere around November 2009, Asa, my younger son (now almost 3), started developing a diaper rash. It's not unusual for him to get an occasional rash. He has sensitive skin, and so we were prepared. We tried all our usual tricks. We used Butt Paste, Aquaphor, Vasaline, Desitin, A&D. We started changing him hourly all day long. For a 2.5 year old, this is a big waste of diapers, but it was worth it to get rid of the rash that no paste could cure.

After using the different types of diaper creams for weeks, I decided it wasn't working. Because he had been sensitive to dairy when he was younger, I decided to work on dietary issues. I limited his fruit intake thinking that maybe his poop was too acidic or sugary. (I know it makes almost no sense now.) I eliminated milk, cheese, and yogurt from his diet. I did this in early December. I remember because it was the holiday season and crazy to try to control what he was eating with all our get-togethers.

In December, we went to my parents' house for Christmas and spent 10 days with them. At some point in early December, the rash started moving down the backs of his legs. During the time we were there, my mom was really appalled by Asa's rash. This was when I decided to start doing very frequent changes.

Also, looking back on Facebook, I found the post from my friend that first caused me to suspect the diapers would be the issue. It was posted January 31.

On January 31, I was reading my Facebook updates and a friend of mine made an offhand comment about how Pampers had a new diaper that was causing rashes.

Apparently pampers has reformulated their diapers to be 20% less material and still as absorbent, but they put them in the old boxes without notice and these new materials can cause serious diaper rashes to babies. hmm, glad I use huggies ;-)

We were really surprised, because none of the boxes of diapers had indicated anything new or different with the diapers. We switched immediately. We noticed a small improvement in the rash. Instead of red, raised, and cracking, it was no longer cracking open.

At this point, I made our first doctor's appointment. We went in, explained our situation to the doctor. He glanced at the rash, said it didn't look like any sort of typical diaper rash but assumed it was a yeast/fungus rash. He recommended an over-the-counter antifungal. We used it for a week with no results. Then I contacted a friend of mine who is a nurse practitioner that specializes in dermatological issues. She recommended that we try some hydrocortizone cream on a small spot. She said that if it was inflamed that would help it. It did. We used it for quite some time, but every time we stopped using it, the rash returned. We finally made an appointment with our family doctor. She diagnosed it as a type of contact dermatitis. She prescribed a stronger steroid and a compounded diaper cream made only at our pharmacy. Finally, after using those for about a month, we are to the point that Asa only has one small red spot on his leg.

I do have to say that looking back I cannot believe how long it took us to put things together. This has been a very long, drawn out issue for us. :(

Think a diaper rash is a diaper rash is a diaper rash? Tell that to Casey.

Tomorrow: Dissection and analysis (we swear)

That's it for today. For those who have been waiting patiently for us to tell you what we think might be wrong with Dry Max diapers, you don't need to be patient for much longer. We'll publish our diaper dissection and analysis of possible causes of rashes by tomorrow at noon. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment below with your thoughts. [Update: Here it is!]

Move on to Part 3 of this series, in which we dissect pre- and post-Dry Max diapers and discuss potential sources of irritation. Or jump back to Part 1, in which we discuss the history of disposable diapering and Pampers' role in it.

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Pampers' Dry Max diapers, touted by the company as disposable diapers' greatest innovation in 25 years, have launched far more buzz than the company could have hoped for, but for all the wrong reasons. Less than one month after the product's official launch, but over a year since it the company being introducing it to consumers both through test groups and surreptitious product swaps, the company is facing an investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an anti-Dry Max 8,000-plus-member Facebook group whose members answer consumer questions on Pampers' own Facebook page faster than P&G marketers do, and a class-action lawsuit. It's a tangled web, and we were determined to get to the bottom not only of the potential problems with Dry Max but the hype that has swirled around the product from both supporters and detractors.

We have organized the results of our research in a series of three four posts on what has become for us a fascinating if somewhat disturbing topic.

In this post, we'll offer a brief history of the competition between Pampers and Huggies that has, in our assessment, led directly to the introduction of Pampers Dry Max. In doing so, we'll touch on the advances in disposable diapering technology that will give you the background you need to get the most out of our second post in this series. In that post, we will dissect both pre- and post-Dry Max Pampers, discuss the scope of the Dry Max diaper rash problem, and highlight some possible product features that could relate to what appears to be an increased incidence of extreme diaper rashes. In a third and final post, we'll explore the social media and corporate damage control that have helped make this story a media feeding frenzy, and we'll look ahead to the future of sustainable disposable diapering, and Procter & Gamble's surprising role in it. (Update: The series has been expanded to four installments; the second, which covers the scope and nature of the problem, is now online.)

Our position regarding the safety of Pampers Dry Max has not changed. We'll explain our impressions of the scope of this problem - as well as narrowing the field of possible sources of it - in our next post, but if all you need is our recommendation, look no further.

On to some ancient history.

Diaper science and diaper marketing

The secret of disposable diapers is that they are highly engineered products that are designed to work in simple ways. Shielding a human being from the potential hazards of his or her own waste while keeping it contained in a package that does as little to offend the world outside as possible is a daunting task, and most of us would agree that every bit of R&D is money well spent.

After the initial invention of disposable paper diapers in the 1940s, advances in diapering technology were fairly incremental for four decades. The deployment of "nonwoven fibers" like plastics and cellulose in the 1950s and 1960s, the evolution of elastic waistbands and stretchy adhesive tabs from the 1960s onward, and the layering and quilting of layers of wood or cellulose fibers to maximize absorption all proceeded along a relatively predictable path. Like astronomers tweaking Ptolemy's model of an Earth-centered universe, engineers perfected the sandwiching of layers that drew wetness from the baby's skin, locked it in absorptive layers, masked odors, and even adjusted skin pH to discourage diaper rashes or used dyes to advertise wetness and needed diaper changes from the outside of the diaper's well-sealed chamber. By the late 1970s, disposable diaper companies, led by Pampers, were putting the final nails in the coffin of widespread cloth diapering in the United States.


But just as Pampers had vanquished its primary competition, everything changed again. The catalyst was a new brand that out-pampered Pampers: Huggies.

The gospel of superabsorbents

In the 1980s, diaper manufacturers gained access to USDA-developed superabsorbent polymers, which could absorb up to 500 times their weight in liquid, and rapidly introduced them in their products. Suddenly, the quantity of wood pulp or cellulose fibers in disposables, could be drastically reduced, as it was far less effective in absorbing urine and fecal liquid than the SAPs. (Current estimates for wood pulp absorption are 4x its weight; Pampers cites is own current SAP as holding up to 25x its weight.) For Procter & Gamble, the arrival of this technology in the manufacturing supply chain couldn't have come at a better time. After decades in business as the top cat of disposable diapers, P&G executives watched as paper company Kimberly-Clark introduced Huggies in 1978 and by the mid-1980s was regularly wiping the church nursery floor with the tear-streamed face of the once-proud Pampers brand. (Pampers, if only by virtue of its attachment to a global industrial giant, still dominates the European diaper market.) Kimberly-Clark, which had built its brand on Kleenex, toilet paper, and newsprint, turned its expertise to the task of building a better diaper, and consumers fled Pampers in droves. When it came to paper products, K-C could beat P&G to a pulp.


Even a quarter of a century ago, Pampers appears to have hoped that SAPs could help them get out from under a competitor that knew its paper. The full story of how Huggies wiped out Pampers as the leading U.S. diaper brand remains to be told, but one notable difference in their branding, marketing, and product development strategies was that Huggies embraced the image of the engorged, load-carrying diaper, flaunting its bulk on happy, oblivious babies. Pampers, in contrast, campaigned relentlessly on the merits of thinner diapers; no other brand embraced this gospel as completely as the engineers at Pampers did. Browsing the commercials available in the scattershot archives of YouTube reveals the fascinating fact that Pampers' story with Dry Max - touted as the company's "biggest advance" in diapering "in 25 years" - is, in fact, an old saw indeed.




Prior to the entrance of SAPs, for all the minor innovations that gilded the lily, premium diapers were thicker diapers; more padding meant a company wasn't skimping on materials, and that diapers could simply hold more. It was natural that P&G, a company with deep links to the chemical industry, could leverage polymer chemistry more rapidly and more fully than Kimberly-Clark, a recent entrant to the diaper market that didn't divest itself of its own wholly-own timber reserves until 1999. Through Pampers, P&G marketing spent thirty years attempting to link sagging, bulky diapers to both physical and emotional constriction, tapping into parents' anxieties about sensitive stages of child development.

The problem was, parents didn't seem to prioritize diaper thinning as much as Pampers did. Year after year, Huggies competed with Pampers for the same premium customers who valued the latest incremental advances and recycled feature additions and were willing to pay for them, and Huggies won the battle every time. For three decades, Pampers has sat in the #2 slot in a product category it helped define in the 1960s.

The diaper war abroad

Ironically, the struggle for the U.S. baby bottom is not as important to these companies as it might appear to us. Sure, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark battle for market share through misleading television advertisements and premium-listed prices undercut by a river of manufacturers' coupons and loyalty programs. Certainly, priorities shift greenward as rethinkers like Seventh Generation push the behemoths towards just enough corporate responsibility to combat their message, and if cloth diaperers could vote in the Diaper Awards they might have a sleeper on their hands. But what's happening here is just a skirmish compared to the spoils to be had in the developing world.

You see, the U.S. disposable diaper market is what industry analysts would term (if you'd forgive the unavoidable pun) "saturated." Fully 95% of American families use disposable diapers, and the market grows only when births rise, diapers get used more quickly, or parents are upsold to from economy to premium brands. The rest of the world, however, is full of people who don't wish to use disposable diapers, or don't wish to use diapers at all, and convincing them to do so in countries like China, India, and Latin America is as potentially lucrative as the African continent was to Nestle formula in the 1980s. Speaking of Africa, the most recent figures we've seen pin diaper "penetration" on the African continent at 15%. In short, the business of diapering in the next decade is the classic international chess game of carefully cultivating a nascent potential "need" using relevant local cultural vibes to create a new baseline of progress that includes a highly profitable product people seem to be doing fine without.

Dry Max: A marketing innovation with real-world consequences

Given the obsessive focus with which manufacturers must attend to marketing products that are in many ways the same, it should not be too surprising to learn that the real innovation behind Dry Max is not one of new technology, but of turning an old solution to a new stated purpose. In short, the thinness Pampers once strove for as a mark of convenience is now being sold as sustainability. "If every Pampers mom switches to Pampers with Dry Max, together they could save almost 20 million pounds of trash every year - That's the weight of 63 Statues of Liberty!" states the Procter & Gamble sustainability website Future Friendly. The pitch below by Pampers R&D's Kerri Hailey is typical of the promotional push Pampers has made for Dry Max, although it is colored by the emerging outcry over diaper rashes that have stolen Pampers' thunder as its rollout unfolded. At about 4:00 Kerri gets into the environmental stuff - a 20% thinner diaper means lower pulp content, fewer resources used, lower transportation costs, and so on - things that moms "as a mom" can feel good about.


Procter & Gamble announced last month that it had formed a "Sustainability Expert Advisory Panel" to advise the company on greening practices throughout the company. Some of those same contacts are now being leveraged to help combat consumer claims of increased incidences and severity of diaper rashes caused by the new Dry Max diapers.

In our next installment, we'll turn a critical eye on P&G's assessment of the Dry Max diaper rash connection. Then a third post will share findings from a dissection of Dry Max and pre-Dry Max Pampers Swaddlers, discuss the design changes behind the new diapers, and catalog some potential sources of irritation in Dry Max diapers that could cause Pampers wearers who never experienced rashes from the older version to suddenly get severe ones. Then, in a fourth and final installment to this investigative series, we'll discuss the public outcry over Dry Max diaper rashes, evaluate the fairness of P&G's falsely-marketed rollout and aggressive response to consumer complaints, hint at new directions for diapers and P&G's real prospects for sustainable disposable diapering, and explore the evolving role of social media activism in confronting potentially hazardous consumer products. Stay tuned!

Part 2 is now online. Read it here! Love this in-depth consumer reporting? Get free RSS or email delivery, connect with us on Facebook, or follow @ZRecs_Safety, @ZRecsMom, and @JMcNichols on Twitter and you won't miss a thing.