Rare Earth Magnets Pose Threat To Children 284
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Many of today's toys contain rare-earth magnets which are much more powerful than the magnets of yesteryear and the magnets pose a serious threat to children when more than one is ingested because as the magnets attract one another they can cause a range of serious injuries, including holes through internal organs, blood poisoning and death (PDF). Braden Eberle, 4, swallowed two tiny magnets from his older brother's construction kit on two successive days last spring and his mother's first reaction was that the magnet would pass through her son's system without a problem. "People swallow pennies of the same size every day," said Jill Eberle. "They're smaller than an eraser." But next morning, with Braden still in pain, the family's doctor told them to go straight to the emergency room where an X-ray revealed two magnets were stuck together. "They were attracted to each other with the wall of each segment they were in stuck together," said Dr. Sanjeev Dutta, the pediatric surgeon at Good Samaritan Hospital who would operate on Braden later that day. "Because they were so powerful, the wall of the intestine was getting squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, and then it just necrosed, or kind of rotted away, and created a hole between the two." The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says at least 33 children have been injured from ingesting magnets (PDF) with a 20 month-old dying, and at least 19 other children requiring surgery."
In toys? (Score:1, Insightful)
Huh? They're putting rare-earth magnets in toys?
The bozo that thought that was a good idea has obviously never actually used a neodymium magnet...
News for nerds? (Score:0, Insightful)
Not sure this news item posted on the right web site. Don't you think this is mission creep, timothy?
Parents (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean like the warnings? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how much you watch kids, they will ALWAYS find that split second they need to put something in their mouth.
Level of risk (Score:5, Insightful)
The pdf says they are aware of a total of 33 injuries and one death in the US ever due to magnet ingestion. Out of a 300 million population that is a vanishingly small risk. Meanwhile there are something like 30,000 accidental poisonings each year. Are we really paying attention to the right things?
Not to sound harsh, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids are over-sheltered (Score:5, Insightful)
There was dangerous stuff in there (power tools and old cans of freon that he never got rid of for some reason) but he told me never to play with that and I was smart enough to listen. When he showed me what a table saw could do to a piece of scrap wood in under 2 seconds I quickly learned that I shouldn't put my finger there. The problem today is that we're treating kids who should be old enough for this stuff like toddlers. (mostly because people have turned into litigious bastards... true, they always were but it seems like it's gotten worse in the last decade or two) As a result, kids are way behind the curve on development than they were when I was growing up because their development is being stunted. If you took a typical sheltered kid from today and moved him back in time about 20 years, he would probably be considered slow and undeveloped.
Re:In toys? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Small parts? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why are you surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not toy rare earth magnets, but rare earth magnets used in toys.
A magnet used as a locking device for the clasp of a book, magnets used in a toy train to hold them together, etc.
Just like lead paint, the substitution is not obvious.
I'm not certain that is good comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a better comparison would be deaths (or injuries) compared to prevalence of the items in question. Of the 300,000,000 people in the US, only a small fraction live in an environment with access to rare earth magnets. But most, if not all, live in an environment where there are poisonous substances. Not to mention that according to the CDC, the overwhelming number of non-intentional poisonings are drug overdoses.
I'm not certain that we're talking about the same class of problems here.
Typo in Headline (Score:4, Insightful)
In other News (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly 300 children drowned in their bath tub.
Nearly 60 drown in a 5 gallon buckets
Over 50 in a hot tub and 16 in toilets.
But of course we need new regulations for magnets.
Re:In toys? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a certain assumption that when you give a child an age appropriate *toy* you can let the child play with the toy without direct supervision. If a parent's job is to literally watch every single thing their child does from playing with their toys to watching their Dora the Explorer videos, when precisely can said parent be expect to cook, eat, poop, or drive? I'm all for parental responsibility, and yes there are many times when a parent should be supervising a child; but really there have to be some activities that at least require a more passive form of supervision or nothing will ever get done. Surely playing with the child's own toys should be one of those times?
Re:Dawin will sort this out (Score:5, Insightful)
Could you come down off your 4-difit UID geek high-horse and for a picosecond entertain the idea that not everything is so easily controlled in a highly dynamic nonlinear multivariate system commonly referred to as a child-rearing household in a developed nation?
Raising children is hard (I say this as a mid-forties bachelor not living in my parents' basement), and I would never dare to presume that avoiding all accidents is possible regarding the welfare of a child. I'd doubly not dare to presume such if I were a parent.
Ignorant as I am, I at least know better than to cast smug blame on the parents of children who have undergone a medical emergency. For all that is good, please follow these steps:
Re:In toys? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter how good of a teacher you are, your two-year old will still stick toys in his mouth.
It doesn't matter how observant a parent you are, there will still be moments where you look away.
Re:Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
My takehome from this article is that if I still had toddlers, I would not keep toys with strong little magnets in my house. And this is a very good time of year to run this type of story.
Re:In toys? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for parental responsibility, and yes there are many times when a parent should be supervising a child; but really there have to be some activities that at least require a more passive form of supervision or nothing will ever get done. Surely playing with the child's own toys should be one of those times?
From the summary, "Braden Eberle, 4, swallowed two tiny magnets from his older brother's construction kit on two successive days last spring and his mother's first reaction was that the magnet would pass through her son's system without a problem. "
I certainly agree with you that passive supervision should be all that is required when a child is playing with their own age appropriate toys, in a "baby-proofed area". But if you plan on only passive supervision then you also have the responsibility to make sure the child does not have access to non-age appropriate items as well. In this case the child got a hold of his older brothers toys, on two separate occasions I might add. As a good parent you should also be reasonably versed on what is and isn't safe to eat. My daughter is 8 years old and I've known for longer than that, that there is a danger in swallowing powerful magnets.
Stupid people dies every day. (Score:2, Insightful)
Smart kids don't swallow their toys. Stupid kids do. Sometimes stupid kids die. Deal with it, in the meanwhile, don't kill the fun for everyone else.
-- Darwin
One can only hope (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In toys? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or how about teaching your kids that you have to be careful with some things, or actually supervising them?
One of these tends to preclude the other. Kids need a certain amount of unsupervised, unstructured play. They need to break things they care about. They need to hurt themselves. They need to be nipped by a dog, burn their fingers, bang their head, and fall over... a lot. A small percentage of them will be seriously hurt, even killed, because of that. But if you reduce the percentage of serious harm too low, you also reduce the development of the child, causing a different kind of harm.
(There's apparently a saying in Norway, "a childhood without a broken arm is a wasted childhood.")
The answer to "Kid got hurt" isn't "Hey Parents, stop being so lazy and watch your fucking kids", the answer is, 'Yeah, that happens."