Apparently, toys are too dangerous to play with and parents should carefully make their choice when deciding which one is good and appropriate for their children.

Braden Eberle, 5, of San Jose, California was given the possibility to draw awareness on how dangerous powerful magnets now found in many children’s toys can be on Tuesday “Good Morning America.”

Last April, Braden swallowed two tiny magnets from his older brother’s construction kit on two successive days. He confessed his mother, Jill Eberle, who did not consider the magnets a threatening to her son’s health. She thought the magnets would pass through her son’s system without problems.

Unfortunately, Braden developed stomach pains by the next day, which made his mom bring him to Good Samaritan Hospital’s emergency room. There she was shocked when pediatric surgeon Dr. Sanjeev Dutta told her son needed immediate surgery because the magnets had been ingested separately and both were in different segments of the intestine. As the magnets were powerfully attracted one to each other, the boy’s intestines were in danger of being damaged.

Dr. Dutta, who is affiliated with Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, described the case in the February issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine as a warning tale for other physicians and parents.

“Because they were so powerful, the wall of the intestine was getting squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, and then it just necrosed, or kind of rotted away, and created a hole between the two,” Dr. Dutta said in his article.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, there has been at least one death attributed to magnet ingestion and at least 19 children required surgery after they swallowed magnets or pieces of metal from their toys. Today’s toys contain neodymium, a rare metal and are far more powerful than those used decades ago. A number of toys, which contained such magnets, have been already recalled.

Dr. Dutta warns parents that swallowing this kind of magnets is dangerous to their children and advises them to carefully supervise when they are playing with such toys. He also urged physicians who confront with such cases to act fast and consider surgery.

“It’s a serious thing. Kids swallow things all the time. Even one magnet can cause a problem if the child has swallowed something else made of metal,” he said in his article.