How We Summarise Recalls — and Why You Should Still Read the Source

A recall notice written by an agency and a manufacturer is a legal document first and a consumer message second. It lists model numbers in the middle of a paragraph, buries the hazard after three sentences of product description, and states the remedy at the end. Nearly every alert on this site therefore carries a short summary.

That summary is generated automatically from the official text. It is useful, it is not authoritative, and the difference matters enough to spell out.

What a summary keeps

What the product is, described physically enough to recognise it: colours, packaging, markings, the shape of a part.
What the hazard is, in the agency’s own terms rather than a softening paraphrase.
What to do — stop using, check the model, contact the manufacturer, return the component.
What it applies to, where the notice narrows it: a model, a date code, a production window.

What a summary drops

The full model and item lists. A notice can list dozens of catalogue numbers. The summary keeps the identifying gist; the list stays in the source.
The remedy mechanics. A phone number, a registration form, a shipping address, a proof-of-purchase condition. Those live in the notice.
The distribution detail. Which states or countries, which retailers, which sales window. This is often the field that decides whether a recall applies to you at all.
The nuance of a legal sentence. “The firm has received reports of” is not the same as “has caused”, and a summary can compress that distinction away.

Where summaries are most useful, and least

Most useful: consumer product notices that are long, repetitive and structured — the summary gets you to “is this my product?” fast, and the photograph does the rest.

Least useful: food, drug and medical device records, where the answer lives in a lot code, a catalogue number or a clinical decision. For those, treat our card as a notification that something was published, then open the official record before doing anything.

Not a substitute at all: anything involving a medicine, a medical device, a child’s health or a possible ingestion. Those are questions for a professional, with the official notice in hand.

How we try to keep summaries honest

We summarise from the official record only — no news articles, no inference from the headline.
We keep the hazard statement close to the agency’s wording instead of rewriting it into a milder claim.
We never add a field the source did not contain: no invented severity, no invented model number, no stock image.
We link the source on every card, in the same place, every time.
Where a summary is missing, we say so rather than filling the gap.

The rule worth keeping

Read the summary, then read the source when the answer matters. On our alerts, that is one click: every card links to the official publication, and for recalls the source is where the model numbers, the lot codes and the remedy terms live.

If you ever find a summary that misstates a notice — a wrong model, a softened hazard, a missing stop-use instruction — that is a defect worth reporting. Get in touch here; corrections go out with the next publication of the affected page.

The current alerts are here, summarized, filtered and linked to their source. Alerts by category can be configured here.

Sources: CPSC recalls · openFDA enforcement reports · our sources page