Advocacy & Safety - CPSC certification? What happened to Snell?

Back in the 80's, when I was little tyke, my dad took me to a bike shop and guided me through the process of picking out a bike and a helmet. One thing that he really impressed upon me was that the helmet should have Snell and ANSI certification stickers inside. Well, I recently bought a bike and a helmet for the first time since then (I was bike-less for quite some time) and I've noticed that, on helmets, there are almost no Snell or ANSI stickers anywhere. All I see are "CPSC" stickers. What's up with that? Is that the bare legal minimum, or is it on par with the above-and-beyond safety expectations that I was told Snell once required?

I saw Snell stickers inside of the Specialized helmets, but only CPSC stickers inside of anything else. I went with a Giro Eclipse--it fit the best, and I've got faith that Giro wouldn't make a crappy helmet--but still, I'm just curious about what the new safety standards are. Or are Specialized helmets actually put through more rigorous tests than anything else I looked at?

US Consumer Product Safety Commission (http://www.cpsc.gov)

http://www.smf.org/ - seems to be still going, there're certifications as recently as 18/4/05. The list is massively reduced though. I seem to remember that the big beef with snell was the cost of certification.

Snell's non-profit whereas cpsc is a government funded agency. While we've never had it so good in terms of protection it looks as though greenback is stronger than consumer safety?

Alternatively, there's little difference between the standards now(snell used to be more stringent and may still be) so the free certification wins?

The fit of a helmet to one's head is far more important than the characteristics tested by the standards labs. Pick any certified helmet which fits your head properly, then ride as though you were not wearing any head protection.

All bike helmets sold in the US must have CPSC certification. I suspect that few manufacturers want to spend the time and money to perform two sets of certification tests.

EDIT:

I took a look at my Specialized helmet. There is a Snell sticker, but it says "Certified by Snell" and states that the helmet meets CPSC standards. Perhaps Snell just performed the testing to CPSC standards and issues a certification number that corresponds to the test? In any event, the sticker did not list any safety standard other than the CPSC one.

A helmet manufactuer can have it's product certified by Snell, but can't sell it unless the CPSC signs off on it.