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Small, strong magnets in toys are harming children; parents warned that dangerous toys still being sold (Seven-year-old Matthew Shedd is the son of Rodney and Betsy Shedd of Rayle. This article, reprinted with permission from The Augusta Chronicle, is a follow-up of Matt’s ordeal after swallowing two magnets last year about this time.) Matthew Shedd is coy about how he ended up swallowing two toy magnets that then tried to connect to each other inside his intestines, punching out holes that needed surgery to repair. But the seven-yearold Wilkes County boy will say this: “They’re not good for you.” Matthew is one of dozens of cases of children who have eaten the new and surprisingly strong toy magnets, called “rare earth” magnets, which prompted voluntary recalls earlier this year by two manufacturers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study earlier this month on 20 cases of children being injured by swallowing the magnets, including a 20- month-old boy who died. Those cases, from reports to the Consumer Product Safety Commis- sion, led the consumer agency to make magnets a focus this year of its annual toy safety alert, said Julie Vallese, its director of information and public affairs. The child’s death and a few early cases prompted the voluntary recall of Magnetix Magnetic Buildings Sets in March, she said. “Shortly after that recall, when we first raised awareness to the problem of magnets, we got more reports from consumers,” Mrs. Vallese said, “and I think because it’s so new there were a number of cases where people felt that it may have been a freak thing or it happened only to them.” There was a second recall in November of Polly Pocket magnetic play sets after more reports of serious injuries, she said. The agency is aware of about 75 cases where children were injured by swallowing magnets. But that doesn’t include Matthew. While he said he doesn’t know how he came to swallow the magnets, his father, Rodney, theorized that he might have been chewing on the plastic coating surrounding the slim magnet. Charles Howell Jr., the chief of surgery at Medical College of Georgia Children’s Medical Center, holds up an inch-long piece that looks frayed on the end. It quickly links up with others from the box to the chain. “Look at these things,” he said, shaking it up and down. “You can’t shake ‘em apart.” That was Matthew’s problem; he had swallowed a second magnet probably hours later. He initially got sick in June 2005 with vomiting but then got better. “We thought he had a virus,” said his mother, Betsy. But then a month later, he started vomiting again and his parents thought he had a virus again. He ended up in the emergency room at Wills Memorial Hospital in Washington, where an object was visible on x-ray, and he was referred to MCG. Dr. Howell said that there were signs of a partial obstruction in the intestines and it was unlikely that it wasn’t related to the object, which the parents thought was a magnet. Pediatric radiologist Susan Greenfield had seen a magnet case in Cincinnati, and when she looked at the x-ray, “she saw that groove in there, and she said there’s two magnets in there, not just one,” Dr. Howell said. He points to a tiny indentation in the center of the object on Matthew’s x-ray. “When you see that groove in that (magnet), his intestine was inside of that groove,” Dr. Howell said. One magnet was in the end of the small intestine and another was in the beginning of the colon near the appendix. They had kinked a piece of intestine between them and caused two holes. Dr. Howell fixed the holes and took out a small piece of the colon and the appendix. He has seen two other magnet cases since. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is working with ASTM International to develop new guidelines for the industry, but Mrs. Shedd said she was in Target recently and saw that there “was a whole aisle” of magnet toys. Matthew now appears to be fine as he races around with his brothers, Mil and Morgan.
It’s scary to think something like this can happen,” Mrs. Shedd said. “You’re just glad you had a good outcome from it.”
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