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Kids Keep Eating Magnets, And Surgeons Say There's Only 1 Way to Stop It
(www.sciencealert.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Same talking points the CPSC used to run ZenMagnets out of business. Guns aren’t 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 you’re 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 they’re absolutely destroying a great stress reliever for what amounts to nothing.
Once again, the Onion is prescient.
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 don’t 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 don’t 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 CPSC’s 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:
https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2023/CPSC-Report-Finds-37-Percent-Spike-in-Child-Poisoning-Deaths-in-2021
Let’s 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.
It’s incredibly clear that the CPSC doesn’t actually care about the facts and someone in the magnet industry pissed them of else they’d 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 couldn’t 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. Here’s a picture of one of the warnings, sorry I couldn’t find a video showing all the warnings, it’s been lost to time.
https://kagi.com/proxy/feature_zenbox_vertical.jpg?c=iDtMQE7EvD9tzLrOrpJdGDL-gy185GEx1HCcnvAh4RFPQdxFEAT-yKxiRpHBnMESh0DOWKZglNHyDton6Z93QKBQdB0YgwOW9_H3c0LgH-NJs2hg0OOfR7BO9OIODjn3-nh073nkWk3DmoVr4QyBvw%3D%3D
Anyway, the CPSC clearly doesn’t care about actual child deaths and injuries, as it didn’t do anything to even slow the rate of injuries or deaths and yet completely banned an entire industry just for pissing them off. I’ve posted all the proof straight from the CPSC above if you don’t believe that statement.
I checked through the links, and what I did find, besides the childrens magnets is that 1/4 of the magnets were small magnet balls, so it is not like it is an uncommon thing. If magnets are ingested they can cause serious surgical emergencies, which will lead to having to cut out part of the intestines as well as potentially cause peritonitis, the surgery will have lifelong consequences, it is of course also possible to die from complications. And small powerful magnets cause the most damage.
Generally the only other foreign body that is as bad to ingest as small magnets are batteries.
Regarding the warnings - Ill say it again, noone really reads those , everyone I have known with the balls has had them on full display without safety. People for solid things like this just look at the warnings and go, well duh its a choking hazard. And then of course theres the classic reasoning of but my kid is smarter.
Is the CPSC right? I mean, their reason stands solid, their response maybe disproportionate. That said I think the idea that the magnet industry somehow wronged the CPSC is a bit conspiratorial.
Also I would not classify drugs as household chemicals, hence why I chose bleach as my example. The other really bad offender for household chemicals used to be 70% vinegar, but that one was banned in the EU, so now we can only buy 9% which will not cause more than an upset stomach generally, most other common household chemicals will not be as bad and many of them still have childproof locks.
I wonder if there's been any research on introducing child-safe locks to household chemicals like we have on laundry detergent and on medications...
Lot of mine seem to have these, possibly even all that were purchased in the last few years.
No idea if this is due to regulations.
Interesting, most I buy or see in stores are just regular containers