Toy magnets a hazard for kids

It was a medical mystery unlike any that David and Lauren Agnew had ever encountered as parents -- and a trip to the pediatrician to aid their son Kyle, 5, didn't help.

The Wading River couple said Kyle felt especially sick and his symptoms weren't subsiding. A battery of procedures from a urinalysis to a strep test all turned up negative.

"We didn't know what the issue was," Lauren Agnew said Wednesday, recalling her son's ordeal a few weeks ago.

Kyle ended up in surgery because he had swallowed magnets that he thought were toys. Ingested objects, such as the magnets found in toys or elsewhere, are a common problem during the holiday season and experts are cautioning parents to be especially vigilant.

They can cause symptoms that mimic myriad illnesses, delaying proper diagnosis.

"He was pale, throwing up; he had flu-like symptoms. We thought it was a stomach virus," Agnew said.

Within days, the boy was curled in a fetal position and vomiting green bile, his parents said. That's when they rushed him to the pediatric emergency department at Stony Brook University Medical Center.

Dr. Thomas Lee, Stony Brook's chief of pediatric surgery, said his role is often that of medical detective. When he received Kyle's X-rays, Lee was surprised to see a kind of disc lodged in the child's large intestine. He ordered surgery.

"What I found were six little magnets," Lee said of the small, flat cylindrical objects removed from the child.

Apparently, when Kyle swallowed the magnets, Lee said, one group of three stacked together in one part of his intestinal tract and three others stacked together in another part. One group of magnets eventually pulled the other to create the stack of six.

Lee surmises magnetic force pulled one stack because it left a pressure sore behind.

When Kyle emerged from the anesthesia, his parents recall him saying he had no idea how the magnets got inside him.

Later, he confessed to swallowing the magnets, which his mom had used to mount homework on a family bulletin board.

For years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued warnings about magnets, citing them as potentially lethal when swallowed.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is working internationally to ensure toy-safety standards because of the presence of small, rare-earth magnets in an array of toys.

Lee, meanwhile, said doctors in Stony Brook's emergency room see about four swallowed toy cases per month, and he's bracing for a surge of ingested objects because of the holidays.

Lee said he recently dislodged a small signpost, part of train set, from the esophagus of another child.

"The good news is that most of the time when kids swallow something, it just passes right through them," Lee said.