A Scottish couple left devastated when their son died from swallowing a button battery are now campaigning to have them removed from children's toys.
One-year-old Hughie McMahon suffered catastrophic organ damage after a battery from his VTech Swing & Sing monkey teddy fell out of the toy and got stuck in his throat, reports say.
The battery is said to have turned his blood acidic and burned a hole in his heart.
His parents are now campaigning for the button-sized batteries to be banned completely.
"They've ruined our life and we want to make sure nobody else goes through what we have," The Sun reports father Hugh McMahon as saying.
According to the petition, surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children's charity in London, are seeing one child a month with corrosive burns caused by swallowing button batteries, causing at least two child deaths a year.
"We do not want any other family to go through what we are going through, we do not want any other child to suffer the way baby Hughie suffered," the petition states.
Unaware their son had swallowed a battery, Hughie's parents called an ambulance after he went "floppy" and they heard a sound coming from his chest when they went to put him to bed.
Hughie was rushed to hospital on December 24, 2021 and died two days later.
The parents found out a battery was missing from the toy after his death.
"It's a living hell. I felt my boy leaving. There's no words on this planet to describe so much pain," mother Christine McDonald told The Sun.
"Nobody warned us about button batteries. I didn't even know what they were but they're in everything. I was more worried about bleach, falling down stairs and bumping heads."
The battery had fallen out of a screw-on compartment in the toy that was meant to keep it safe. Hugh McMahon told the outlet the button batteries are "absolutely everywhere".
Local MP Clare Adam has tabled a question to the Scottish Parliament on the issue.
