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Rare Earth Magnets Pose Threat To Children
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."
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...
So, ask for them to be done medium?
But... How do they work?
Not sure this news item posted on the right web site. Don't you think this is mission creep, timothy?
Parents paying attention to their kids is the cure, not banning magnets...
I thought toys with small parts had warnings and age restrictions on them, magnets or not..?
These magnets come with clear warnings not to let kids eat them as they may become attached inside them. Seriously, is this article nothing more than a longer version of the warning that appears on the magnets themselves?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These can be used to simulate a tongue piercing by placing one on the top of your tongue, and another below it. Obviously this leads to at least a few teenagers swallowing magnets as well.
Why are you surprised? This is exactly what happens when Americans buy toys manufactured in third-world shithole nations, where the concept of "safety" is virtually unheard of.
So does that mean Slashdot/ThinkGeek/GeekNet is trying to kill off our future nerds and geeks? :P
This is well-known. Why is is news?
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?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I think this somehow makes neodymium magnets seem even cooler. They've killed children... not by poisoning them, but by magnetism alone.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
...how do they... pose threats to children? I don't want to talk to a scientist, though... those motherfuckers are lying and getting me pissed...
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
33 children injured total is not a huge number. I think more children are injured by electrical outlets, knives, stoves, etc around the house each day. Parents need to watch their kids. The child in the summary would have had a lot less trouble if they had taken the kid to the doctor immediately; rather then waiting a few days. If the child is in pain they need to get the kid checked out asap. That being said there could be a warning in the box stating that swallowed magnets warrant a trip to the doctor, but I don't see why this a news fro nerd or really something that matters to most.
"Last spring", in this case, means April, 2007.
I agree that four years old is a bit young to be playing with rare earth magnets, but around the age of 6 I already knew better than to put anything like that into my mouth. Around that time I was playing in my grandpa's workshop (he used to work in refrigerator repair, and the place was full of scrap metal, scrap wood, small electric motors, MAGNETS *gasp* , hand tools, and lots of other cool stuff to play with.) Naturally, I quickly got fond of building things and tinkering with machines.
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.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
still swallowing things like magnets? Seems odd to me. That being said, there are also fake tongue piercing which are rare earth magnets too. Real easy to swallow and they wreak havoc inside the body as well. So I guess even as your child ages you have to constantly keep forbidding stuff.
The title of this article should say "... Pose Threat to Hungry Children".
Am I the only one who first read "People swallow penises of the same size every day..." ?
Had to rub my eyes and read that sentence again...
Fuck, man. Powerful magnets pose a danger even to college students!
For those of us involved with teaching in Comp. Sci. programs, at least once a semester we have to deal with students requesting deferred projects or exams due to magnet injuries. They open up hard drives to get the magnets, not realizing how strong these magnets are. Then they end up with a broken finger, or have crushed their lips or nose or earlobes. Often times, these are students who are in their later years of study, and some of them are even graduate students.
These incidents happen frequently enough that it's something we talk about at lunch when we're at conferences with colleagues. About six months ago I was at a conference where one of the other academics was talking about how one of her students had crushed the head of his penis with some of these magnets, and had to undergo reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation. He had to miss a year of school, but still felt entitled to get credit for courses he'd only half completed, or some bullshit like that. She just couldn't believe that somebody would be stupid enough to put powerful magnets near his penis.
Hopefully we'll see fewer of these injuries with the rise of solid-state drives. It's a real bureaucratic pain in the ass filling out the paperwork for deferred exams.
Do you have children? If so have you managed to watch them every second of their lives. No matter what you do. They will find a way.
Just tell your infant to only swallow one at a time. Problem solved!
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.
Thinning of the herd.
The title is misleading. It makes one believe Rare Earth Magnets might pose a tactile toxic or radiative concern.
Rename it to "Rare Earth Magnets pose threat to children who ingest them" because otherwise you are wasting my time. My kid doesn't eat magnets and I've known about this hazard for a couple years.
This is not only OLD news, this is IRRELEVANT news to me that you misled me into re-reading.
I have a child, he is 12 now. He NEVER had a problem swallowing stupid shit when he was young. At 6 years old he was at least competent enough to know not to swallow anything but food. When he was a bit younger yea sure that might have posed a risk but we were very attentive parents and always kept an eye on him and were very careful about what we left out. Additionally we talked to him constantly and warned him about the risk of such things, and yes believe it or not that does work. Children are smarter than we give them credit for and allow them to be by dumbing everything down for them. Personally, I think that if you have 6 year old still doing that sort of thing you've got more problems than you know. Lets just say the problem extends beyond your child, stupid parents make stupid babies.
"Rare Earth Magnets" should read "Negligent Parents".
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Just heat the child up to above the Curie temperature of the magnets and they will fall right off!
Funny typos aside, that's besides the point. How many children live (or play) in environments with easily obtainable rare earth magnets compared to those who live (or play) in environments with easily obtainable poisonous substances?
I don't know the answer to that. My point is that if we're going to compare, we should find out. Otherwise we're comparing the price of tea in China to the price of coffee in Tokyo.
I don't think there will be any changes to the toy market. To ban rare earths in toys would be expensive and unprofitable. In all fairness, because most dangerous household objects do not puncture internal organs, this warning label may need a little more emphasis. I'd suggest bold-type.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
http://thebestpictureproject.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/silence-of-the-lambs3.jpg These work wonders on them if you cover the mouth hole with screen wire.
Do you have children? If so have you managed to watch them every second of their lives.
We don't let them out of their locked cages that often.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just like lead paint, the substitution is not obvious.
http://drmustafaerarslan.net/
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:
blog
if kids do swallow a Rare Earth Magnet, the parents can keep an eye on them a lot easier... just check the front of the fridge! they'll probably be stuck there....
Spoons Pose Threat To Children!
iPods Pose Threat To Children!
Diapers Pose Threat To Children!
Meteors Pose Threat To Children!
Internetz Pose Threat To Children!
So many possibilities for a sensational headline. Poor Timmy, how does he choose... so poorly, so often?.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Every year especially before holidays they come up with a new evil thing. Apples are dangerous at Halloween, as evil humans in your neighborhood might put in razor blades. Really happening is this only a few times, I honestly don't know anyone personally or anyone who knows someone else personally who had to deal with such a situation. And there toys signed to be not for children below 3 years, because they might eat them accidentally or for curiosity. This applies Lego and wow it applies to magnets. It also applies to marbles (you know those things you played in kindergarten). And just to make it clear: Coffee in paper cups is dangerous to kids. Such can might fall over with all the hot coffee in it and that liquid can cause burns to arms and legs.Your kid can even die when you sleep on your sofa and then subsequently rollover and fall down on the head of you kid. So sofas are dangerous too. We should get rid of sofas, tables, heavy objects, sharp objects (when I think about it any object can pose a danger to kids and even adults!!!!) and all the other things we tell the kids not to do. Do not stick you head in an microwave oven an turn it on.
Just before it comes out have another kid put one in their mouth. Voila! Human centipede!
Still swallowing things that are not food at age four? That kid has bigger problems coming in life!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
What four year old is still swallowing random objects?
U mad, 6-difit UID ?
Almost all items can cause injuries if a kid swallows them regularly.
this just in... glass shards pose a threat to children as well, especially if swallowed.
It is actually probably better if they swallow them together. If swallowed at the same time, they will pass together. If swallowed separately, one could be further ahead in the intestines and as they pass near each other in the snaking tubes of the intestines, they could stick together with intestine walls in between.
Seriously, what the fuck is this crap? There have been a few of these incidents in the last 10 years or so. This story is old news. The only explanation for posting this garbage is sensationalism and a need to drive advertising impressions. I can believe Slashdot would be stupid enough to post this story. I *CAN'T* believe all you idiots are dumb enough to come in here and actually have discussions about it. Bunch of trolled idiots.
The kid did eat them one at a time, as even the summary states.
Here is a great video explaining how magnets will hurt you.
A new research study has found that being alive poses multiple threats not only to children, but to all living things. The study discovered that just by being alive your chance of dying is an astounding 100%. More on this shocking study at 11.
And it's official: *everything* is bad for children. Paranoid parents are so much easier for marketers and politicians to manipulate.
It's science, people!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
From Wikipedia:
Stercoral perforation is the perforation or rupture of the intestine's walls by its internal contents, such as foreign objects, or, more commonly, by hardened feces (fecalomas) which may form in long constipations or other diseases which cause obstruction of transit, such as Chagas disease, Hirschprung's disease, toxic colitis and megacolon.
Stercoral perforation is a very dangerous, life-threatening situation, as well as a surgical emergency, because the spillage of contaminated intestinal contents into the abdominal cavity leads to peritonitis, a rapid bacteremia (bacterial infection of the blood), with many complications.
I once saw a woman die from constipation.
I'm not an EE but could you degauss a Rare Earth Magnet in an MRI or other magnetic coil if it was injested?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
But I'll bet you paid a lot more attention to the items you knew could be dangerous and not so much to the generally harmless ones.
Many parents aren't aware that rare earth magnets are not like the chunks of hard rubber or ferrite that they had when they were kids. Once made aware they'll put them in the more attention category and we'll see a lot less incidents.
Don't forget the good side of every story.
The sideeffects will weed out wimpy teenagers that cannot take pain
and orders fake neodynium "piercing" kits.
Does it NOT say on toys that they should be kept away from those under______age? Then it is the responsibility of the PARENTS to insure no one under that prescribed age is allowed to be around such toys. Here we go again...there will be endless class action lawsuits, and we'll have to endure more stupid "if you or a loved one has been injured while playing with X toy, call the law offices of we sue and make tons of money". I've gotten so sick of the stupidity of the average human that sometimes I wish a huge asteroid would wipe the whole thing out so nature & god can start all over. People wonder why intelligent life in outer space has not contacted us. Well, when you see stories about how adults are so stupid as to allow a small child anywhere near something they can put into their mouth, then you know why they steer clear of the planet Earth.
Survival of the fittest.
If little johnny eats magnets. He might not get to breed someday.
This is a GOOD thing. And it's pretty silly to blame the magnet.
How about blaming the parents. Or the kid. He was obviously stupid.
Ouch. brutal truth. yeah that'll get modded to -10 billion.
This story comes from the Magnetix recall of 2006: "CPSC and Mega Brands are aware of one death, one aspiration and 27 intestinal injuries. Emergency surgical intervention was needed in all but one case." The toy was a construction set of plastic parts with small embedded magnets, usable by small children. The small magnets weren't embedded very well, apparently just pressed into recesses in the plastic, and came out easily. Mega Brands paid a $1.1 million fine for this.
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
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It's inevitable that some kid is going to be harmed by something at some point in time. Parents need to start taking responsibility of watching their kids. At that young age, critters don't have common sense. Parents are stupid to think otherwise and should be teaching them right, wrong, safe, danger, good, bad. he write-up says it all: the mother's first reaction was "it won't harm him". What else is she letting the kid eat because "it won't harm him"? Apparently we have a parent with no common sense either, one that is not ready to be raising children. Jeez.
It's sad to see material things and freedoms being banned or regulated by the Nanny-nuts, and it's sad to not see the right people slapping parents with a sensibility stick when they take up a crusade because of something stupid that they could have prevented. Instead, we all end up being inconvenienced or punished by their failures.
I don't know what kind of people Jill hangs around, but I for one don't not see people swallowing pennies every day.
I think the key problem here is that the children don't have warning labels attached. I propose that in future hospitals tattoo babies shortly after, or if possible before, birth with something along the lines of "WARNING: child may do dangerous things". Billions of other warning labels would then be unnecessary.
It's too late once they're born. Put the warning on the condom. WARNING: Having children will turn your hair grey, ruin your sex life, and that's when things are going well! ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Maybe I'm just a terrible person, but I don't think The Children make any person or any claim blameless or beyond scrutiny.
If a kid swallows a rare-earth magnet, the best thing to do is to seek medical attention RIGHT AWAY. Secondly, TAKE THE SOURCE OF THE MAGNETS AWAY FROM THEM!
A suitable punishment for such behavior would be to make them eat things that no kid would want to eat:
1. Chili peppers,
2. Castor oil (the medical stuff),
3. Lima beans,
4. Anchovies / Sardines
You can also spray some electronics duster on the stuff you don't want them to eat, but know they will.
The 'compressed air' stuff sold at electronics shops contains Bitrex, which I found out the hard way (by accident) tastes like absolute crap, makes everything else taste like absolute crap, stays on the hands (until they get a good scrubbing), and will linger for an hour or so in your mouth.
(This is the kind of stuff that happens when a bunch of cops get bored and realize the department is awash in office supplies and Christmas food. It made a better prank than crank-calling the Lt. from the office next to his, but that's another story.....)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
"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. "
If your kid swallowed something and is in pain, you should probably get that looked at right away.
They can be a danger to kids (just about anything can be a danger to kids) and that is good to know for people who may not realize the power in rare earth magnets. But, more importantly, the use of rare earths creates a dependence on China that is critical although new companies are now trying to fill the supply gap. That makes a good stock market emerging market if you trust in such things. Also, the conditions at such mines and the corresponding factories are lethal with likely many generations of Chinese and 3rd world laborers going to die like the early days of the coal mining industry. Better extraction and refining methods are needed as well as alternatives to rare earths which are being pursued. I have written a few articles on the rare earths and these magnets: http://againsttheodds.hubpages.com/hub/Super-Neodymium-Magnets and http://againsttheodds.hubpages.com/hub/The-Race-For-The-Stocks-Of-The-17-Rare-Earth-Elements are a few.
That you never breed and therefore prevent your faulty genes from contaminating the gene pool. What other excuse would there be for a loser to try to blame the parents for the actions of infants in a sorry attempt at justifying their own deluded sense of adequacy.
For those of you who have been fortunate enough to breed, what do you do to keep your spawn from being harmed while sequestered in your lair? Here are a few tips:
If a toy includes a rare earth magnet as a part and that part is easy to detach and consume, then a house with that toy would probably count as an environment where children have easy access to rare earth magnets, no?
They must not be too rare if they are being used in children's toys. Whats the requirement of being classified rare?
Jack of all trades,master of none
30 kids is one out of every TEN MILLION people in the U.S.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that parents should not pay attention to this issue, but 30 kids a year is NOTHING. Far far more die of bathtub accidents, but you don't see people making a big deal out of bathtubs.
It is 1,000 or more times more likely that the kid will get struck by lightning. Should you, therefore, force kids to carry around a lightning rod everywhere they go?
This is one of those "mis-perception of risk" things that you read about. There are much more important things in this world that need your attention.
Surely playing with the child's own toys should be one of those times?
Only if they are age appropriate toys. Toys with small, powerful magnets in them are not suitable for small children nor are they marked as appropriate for small children. Hence as a parent you should not give them to small children nor should you let them play with them without supervision - and even then only if you understand the risks which clearly this parent did not.
I'm surprised they haven't caused any sexual accidents. I can think up some interesting uses for such magnets right now.
Table-ized A.I.
I brought two rare earth magnets that were about the size of marbles to a Christmas dinner one year.
I showed people how they would stick together, placed on the palm and back of my hand.
My brother in law took them, put them on either side of his nose and a second or two later they rolled down and popped into his nostrils with that little piece of flesh in there separating them.
He said it felt like someone was squeezing the inside of his nose with pliers, etc.
Lot of snot, took longer than you'd think to get them out.
When I moved to indy some years ago, there was a spooky-looking mansion a block away with a sign that said "R B Annis Corp." It turns out that Mr Annis was an expert on building machines that demagnetized things. He's dead now, but his company is still around out in the suburbs somewhere. I'm sure they've never had a case where the thing to be demagnetized was inside a person. But they are engineers,and solving problems is what they do.
That's fine until they lean up against the refrigerator :-)
I was given a rare-earth magnet by my shepherd and now whenever I eat grass this magnet prevents the nails and barbed wire from passing throughout my stomachs to a violent conclusion at the anal sphincter. I was told that when the day comes for me to be crucified between to shishkibob sticks that I will have collected about 50-cents worth of iron for a cheap tip to the butcher that he should recycle for the wardrive. Yep, I'm always in good hands.
-Mr. (Your-Name: Heretoforebishopric)
So the question is why are they using "rare" earth magnets instead of regulars ones, and those toys they had are probably likely to still be usable unlike the cheap(er) plastic crap we have on everything now. But still seems like a waste of rare earth magnets.
If kids eat them. It sounds like the issue here is not that the magnets are particularly dangerous (i never ate any pennies, and I doubt most kids do)--but rather that parents don't perceive/anticipate the danger and seek medical help before a situation forms. If your kid drank a cup of bleach, you would, I hope, immediately take him to the hospital. People just need to understand the same mindset applies to small powerful magnets.
And, just as you would bleach, don't put them where a small child may get to them. It's really a pretty simple fix.
Why would the mother's first reaction be an expectation that the magnets would pass through the kid's system? Magnets tend to stick to one another. Humanity has known this for a little while now.
This reminds me of a story about leaded plastic. An American company had plastic rules produced in China, and the tested positive for lead but not to any immediately dangerous degree unless you were sticking them in your mouth. The American company was furious at the Chinese manufacturer and questioned why they would make such a thing. The Chinese manufacturer, confused, asked "why would any child stupid enough to put a ruler in their mouth be using a ruler in the first place?".
These magnets are basically the same thing - they are dangerous and they shouldn't be near little kids. You hide your knives, lighters, batteries, and medicine from them so why should this be any different. The article notes a case where it was in a construction kit - even the toys my 3 year old plays with I wouldn't let near a baby so it's their own fault for not managing their environment. I mean come on, the kids swallowed not one but two of them on -different- days.
Actually, the correct advice is the opposite. As long as the magnets enter your child together, they are likely to stay attached in the same formation, and it is unlikely any piece of your child's organs will come between them.
I know this because we spent several weeks last year panicking after 6 magnetic "buckyballs" (the rare earth magnets that look like cake decorations!) were accidentally discovered in my 3-year old daughter when she went in for a chest x-ray. I had gotten a set the previous year, before they came with giant warnings on the package, and we had played with them together several months earlier.
Luckily for us, the magnets were stuck together in a straight line, and though they stayed in the same place despite laxatives, etc. for several weeks, on the day we went in to plan the surgery to have them removed, it turned out she had passed them.
But the human species' kids are so stupid they stick anything that doesn't remotely resemble food in their mouth? God, if a species in the wild had kids as useless as ours they'd be extinct within one generation.. Just had to be said..
I don't know about the Thais, but I doubt most parents would wean their babies on spicy food.
On the other hand, capsaicin eaten by the mother can end up in the breast milk, thus Thai babies' organism can a little bit get used to it earlier in life as other children.
they'd have grown out of putting just anything in their mouths :).
~ 3 y.o.
Afterward the part of the brain has grown enough to be able to repress in-born reflexes like swallowing anything put into the mouths.
Until that point, children can't help it. It's just a reflex, anything going near the mouth *will* be swallowed, no matter what.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]