DAYTON, OHIO - With the recent recall of more than 10 million toys made in China, parents may feel that the threat posed by those toys is over.

What parents don't know is that recalled children's products are often resold in the world's largest yard sale -- eBay -- and wind up back in kids' hands.

A new study by a University of Dayton child psychologist found a significant number of recalled toys, safety devices, bassinets and baby walkers at online auction sites years after those products had been recalled, putting other kids at risk of injuries or death.

"These things resurface in secondhand markets or are recycled" as hand-me-downs, said Keri Brown Kirschman, an assistant professor of child psychology specializing in pediatric injury prevention. "When we go to buy or sell or donate, we're not thinking of recalls that happened two or three years ago."

Kirschman's research didn't deal with the 2007 recalls, but it illustrates how responding to those recalls now will keep the Mattel and Fisher-Price toys out of circulation in the future.

Though eBay has a policy prohibiting the sale of recalled products, enforcement is lax, and products are still getting through that safety net, Kirschman said.

Parents -- as buyers or sellers -- need to be more diligent in verifying that those products were not previously recalled, Kirschman said.

"If you think there's a potential for a recall, if you're in doubt, leave it out," Kirschman said.

Kirschman randomly selected 150 products recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission between 1992 and 2004 and searched eBay listings for those items for 30 days.

The study, published this month in Injury Prevention magazine, found 141 of the 150 targeted items for sale, and 70 percent of them were purchased by unsuspecting parents.

Some of the items had been recalled in years past because of documented deaths or risks for "burns, lacerations, choking -- lots of examples of those," she said.

Parents who are buying and selling recalled children's items on eBay aren't doing it intentionally, Kirschman said.

"They just aren't aware of an item's history and thus the hazards," she said.

Items stay in circulation when parents don't respond to recalls. In the last decade, 60 million units of child products have been recalled in the U.S. -- but many of those are still "at large," with only 16 percent to 18 percent returned to the manufacturer or fixed.

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