Kids Keep Eating Magnets, And Surgeons Say There's Only 1 Way to Stop It
Toy magnets pose a serious risk for young children, even when parents are supervising playtime.
In the interest of saving anyone else falling for the clickbait, the "1 Way" in the headline is "don't let kids touch magnets"
Thank you!
Kids keep eating lots of things. The âone wayâ to stop it: parenting. But even that doesnât always work because kids are like⌠that. Iâm sure that if you went 4000 years in the past, ancient toddlers would be putting stones and styli and tabula rasae in their mouths, and 4000 years from now theyâll be putting futuristic whatevers in their mouths. Theyâre toddlers. Itâs what they do. Sometimes theyâre magnets. In the future articles will read: Kids Keep Eating Dermal Regneratorsâ 5 Ways to Make Them A For-Profit Clinic or whatever
ÂŻ(ă)_/ÂŻ
The point is that magnets pose a greater threat than most things that are commonly swallowed. This article identifies that risk and tries to spread the word to treat magnets as more dangerous than coins or other random small objects which may be choking hazards.
Fair enough. I was just mocking the headline.
Same talking points the CPSC used to run ZenMagnets out of business. Guns arenât too dangerous to keep around kids, but magnets with the boxes absolutely *plastered * with warnings are. No joke, my zen magnets had over ten warnings on each box. All in bright red letters.
And if you go look at the actual evidence youâre gonna see that household chemicals cause way more damage and death than these magnets ever will. I have no clue who has it out for these magnets but theyâre absolutely destroying a great stress reliever for what amounts to nothing.
Nice article.
The endoscopists at our childrens hospital also echoed that magnets are a super common foreign body ingestion, any two magnets swallowed is a huge hazard with a high potential for lifelong consequences. And the little balls are supposedly the worst as they have a small surface area in addition to being fairly strong, so they cause perforations quickly.
Also warnings on a magnet box or other toys will be ignored far more commonly that on household chemicals. I donât know any people who keep bleach on their office desk, and even then it is in a childproof bottle. But many will have these little magnet balls on full display or somewhere a child can reasonably reach, some parents give these to inapropriately aged kids to play with even. Nobody gives a bottle of bleach for their kids to play with.
You donât have to give a bottle of bleach. The point is that most household chemicals have hardly any warnings on them at all and the ones they do have are written in tiny text on the back. And no, most household chemicals do not have locking bottles. Sure things like bleach do, but you purposefully chose one to try and fit your narrative. Turns out, bleach was the number one household chemical to injure children in 2006! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20679298/
Weird.
Just from the CPSCâs own data, they estimate 66,600 injuries a year just for children under five years old. https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/AnnualReportonPediatricPoisoningFatalitiesandInjuries_January2022.pdf
Note that bleach is number five now, rather than number one, behind:
Letâs look at another report which states that ~50% of the magnet injuries come from products marketed to children, not these magnets made for adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125079/
Huh, weird that the CPSC makes no mention of this when they make quite a few claims about magnets in their announcement of a complete ban https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2022/CPSC-Approves-New-Federal-Safety-Standard-for-Magnets-to-Prevent-Deaths-and-Serious-Injuries-from-High-Powered-Magnet-Ingestion last year.
Itâs incredibly clear that the CPSC doesnât actually care about the facts and someone in the magnet industry pissed them of else theyâd be spending their time trying to fix the actual things that are killing children, like firearms.
https://www.safekids.org/sites/default/files/documents/2022_skw_national_parent_survey.pdf
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754
Just to end this post; the zen magnet warnings covered every inch of the packaging, you opened the box and there were more warning, you opened the bag in the box and there were even more warnings. There were permanent warnings in bright red text that couldnât be removed from the box. This was more warning than any other product on the market and yet zen magnets have been completely banned, while bleach is still sold at your local grocery store with no ID necessary. Hereâs a picture of one of the warnings, sorry I couldnât find a video showing all the warnings, itâs been lost to time.
Anyway, the CPSC clearly doesnât care about actual child deaths and injuries, as it didnât do anything to even slow the rate of injuries or deaths and yet completely banned an entire industry just for pissing them off. Iâve posted all the proof straight from the CPSC above if you donât believe that statement.
Then stop making the magnets so damn tasty
Coat them with the same stuff the Switch cartridges have!
Well, now I've got to lick my cartridge
I remember I did that the first day I got a switch, just to see what the hype was all about. Tasted pretty damn awful but I think if you were really committed to it and drank a lot of water you could probably swallow one.
Itâs been an hour, they dead.
Enjoy!
LSD?
Alternative option: when a kid eats a magnet, use a really huge magnet to get that magnet out of the kid. Guaranteed to make sure there are no repeat offenders.
"Just months after satisfying their craving for Tide pods..."
Metal dentures?
A bigger magnet
Roy Scheider has entered the boat chat
