Two children needed surgery after swallowing magnets from cubes
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Thursday the recall of about 213,500 “Goody King” magnetic building toys, citing an ingestion hazard that has led to at least two children needing surgery.
According to a notice published by the CPSC, the toys’ building cubes can break or open, allowing the magnets inside to become loose. That poses a serious ingestion hazard for children, the commission said. When high-powered magnets are swallowed, they can attract each other or other metal and become lodged in the digestive system, the agency warned — a sequence that can potentially lead to “perforations, twisting, and/or blockage of the intestines, blood poisoning and death.”
Yi Suen Commerce, the Hong Kong-based company that sells the toys under the Goody King brand, is aware of two children who ingested magnets from the toys and needed surgery to remove them, the CPSC said. Yi Suen is also aware of at least 27 reports of the cubes breaking or opening.
The CPSC’s listed outcomes — “perforations, twisting, and/or blockage of the intestines, blood poisoning and death” — describe the medical consequences the agency attributes to multi-magnet ingestion. The mechanism the commission described, in which magnets attract each other or other metal inside the digestive tract and compress tissue, is what led to the surgical removals the notice documents.