They’re flashy, sometimes musical, and always designed to catch the eye of children.

But they’re also short-lived toys and novelties, and easily disposable, meaning that hundreds of pounds of mercury batteries could be entering the waste stream statewide this Christmas. Displaying some of the mercury-powered gewgaws, activists earlier this week called on the Legislature to outlaw such items to safeguard public health and the environment.

“There’s not only the choking hazard,” said Sandy Cort of the Learning Disabilities Association of Maine, “there’s the poisoning aspect.”

One of the items on the activists’ hit list is a battery-powered lollipop. Cort said the battery at the end of the pop can be easily exposed by popping off a cover plate. “A child could swallow the battery,” she said, putting mercury directly into the youngster’s body.

More commonly, however, would be a scenario that sees the bouncing balls, singing reindeer and other items simply run out of power after a few hours or days. At that point, children lose interest in the gadgets, and mom or dad tosses the toy into the trash, said Cort.

Then the batteries are incinerated, she said, adding mercury first to the air Mainers breath and then to the ground and water as the element falls back to earth. The Natural Resources Council of Maine said the miniature batteries are in hundreds of gift items found on store shelves this season.

“Who would expect to find the latest toxic mercury threat in a holiday gift to a child?” asked Matt Prindiville, the council’s outreach coordinator. “The Legislature needs to take these toxic toys off the shelves to prevent needless mercury pollution.”

The NRCM and Cort’s organization are members of the New England Zero Mercury Campaign, a coalition of environmental and public health organizations calling for zero mercury use, release and exposure by 2010.

All of the toys in question are already illegal in New Hampshire, and most are illegal in Connecticut.

The campaign recently collected toys throughout New England that ranged from flashing bouncing balls to reindeer antlers that play songs. The council said 28 batteries collected from the toys were sent to a laboratory in Indiana and all were found to contain mercury.

Cort said individual stores selling the items haven’t been asked to pull them from their shelves because most of the stores are part of national chains. “Legislation,” she said, “is the best way to prevent” such toys and gadgets from coming into Maine.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in six women of child-bearing age have enough mercury in their bodies to contribute to learning disabilities in children, Cort noted. The National Academy of Science maintains that 3 percent of the nation’s learning-disabled children suffer from mercury poisoning, and mercury is suspected of playing a role in the disabilities of another 25 percent of children, she added.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.