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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."
But... How do they work?
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.