Zucker is being a little misleading about this. His firm did indeed have a long relationship with the CPSC, and throughout that relationship, no matter what their firm did to mitigate the risks their magnets had to children, reports of life threatening injuries not only continued but
increased. The CPSC didn't kill their product for sport; they acted based on the empirical evidence.
You'd wonder, reading this article, what problem CPSC had with a simple magnetic toy set. After all, nowhere in this article do the words "surgery" or "intestinal perforation" occur. The problem is simple. A child can swallow a penny, or even a nail(!), and the ER doctors will send them home to wait for it to pass. But if you happen to swallow two tiny rare earth magnets, what can happen is that they latch together on opposing sides of loops of small intestine, gradually digging their way through the tissue and spilling gut bacteria into the abdominal cavity, which results in sepsis.
"[W]hen these high-‐powered magnets are swallowed, endoscopic or surgical intervention is required in nearly all cases to prevent bowel damage." - Nerissa S. Bauer, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
Skateboarding is probably statistically more dangerous than tiny rare earth magnets. But parents know how to mitigate the risks of skateboarding. My guess is that 80% of the parents on Hacker News don't even know that swallowing a tiny smooth round magnet is more dangerous to a toddler than swallowing a nail. Certainly teenagers don't understand this, because they were using Buckyball magnets to hold fake lip piercing studs.
Zucker's firm attempted to address the problem with warning labels. But how do you put warning labels on a set of 100 tiny metal balls? Even if the label read "DO NOT EVER LEAVE THESE OUT OF THE BOX", which they don't and can't because keeping them out of the box is a big part of the point of the toy, what good is that going to do when a teenager buys a set and leaves it on his desk in the house he shares with a 4 year old? Because that is not an uncommon scenario.
In the end, the issue here is not that the government thinks it should be unlawful to sell small rare earth magnets. It's that the government thinks companies shouldn't be able to profit from selling them as direct-to-consumer toys and novelty items. If CSPC is seeing marked increases in injuries due to magnets now, when the products are in their early-adopter infancy (there are, according to Zen Magnets, only two companies selling sets like this as consumer products), the CPSC can reasonably assume that the damage would be much worse as the products mainstreamed.
Buy the magnets online, or from a lab supply store, and give them the respect they deserve.
You'd wonder, reading this article, what problem CPSC had with a simple magnetic toy set. After all, nowhere in this article do the words "surgery" or "intestinal perforation" occur. The problem is simple. A child can swallow a penny, or even a nail(!), and the ER doctors will send them home to wait for it to pass. But if you happen to swallow two tiny rare earth magnets, what can happen is that they latch together on opposing sides of loops of small intestine, gradually digging their way through the tissue and spilling gut bacteria into the abdominal cavity, which results in sepsis.
"[W]hen these high-‐powered magnets are swallowed, endoscopic or surgical intervention is required in nearly all cases to prevent bowel damage." - Nerissa S. Bauer, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
Skateboarding is probably statistically more dangerous than tiny rare earth magnets. But parents know how to mitigate the risks of skateboarding. My guess is that 80% of the parents on Hacker News don't even know that swallowing a tiny smooth round magnet is more dangerous to a toddler than swallowing a nail. Certainly teenagers don't understand this, because they were using Buckyball magnets to hold fake lip piercing studs.
Zucker's firm attempted to address the problem with warning labels. But how do you put warning labels on a set of 100 tiny metal balls? Even if the label read "DO NOT EVER LEAVE THESE OUT OF THE BOX", which they don't and can't because keeping them out of the box is a big part of the point of the toy, what good is that going to do when a teenager buys a set and leaves it on his desk in the house he shares with a 4 year old? Because that is not an uncommon scenario.
In the end, the issue here is not that the government thinks it should be unlawful to sell small rare earth magnets. It's that the government thinks companies shouldn't be able to profit from selling them as direct-to-consumer toys and novelty items. If CSPC is seeing marked increases in injuries due to magnets now, when the products are in their early-adopter infancy (there are, according to Zen Magnets, only two companies selling sets like this as consumer products), the CPSC can reasonably assume that the damage would be much worse as the products mainstreamed.
Buy the magnets online, or from a lab supply store, and give them the respect they deserve.