cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45088835
A 13-year-old boy in New Zealand swallowed up to 100 high-power magnets he bought on Temu, forcing surgeons to remove tissue from his intestines, doctors said on Oct 24.
After suffering four days of abdominal pain, the unnamed teen was taken to Tauranga Hospital on the North Island.
“He disclosed ingesting approximately 80 to 100 5x2mm high-power (neodymium) magnets about one week prior,” said a report by hospital doctors in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
The magnets, which have been banned in New Zealand since January 2013, were bought on online shopping platform Temu, they said.
An X-ray showed the magnets had clumped together in four straight lines inside the child’s intestines.
“These appeared to be in separate parts of bowel adhered together due to magnetic forces,” they said.
[…]
Surgeons operated to remove the dead tissue and retrieve the magnets, and the child was able to return home after an eight-day spell in hospital.
“This case highlights not only the dangers of magnet ingestion but also the dangers of the online marketplace for our paediatric population,” said the authors of the paper, Dr Binura Lekamalage, Dr Lucinda Duncan-Were and Dr Nicola Davis.
Surgery for ingestion of magnets can lead to complications later in life such as bowel obstruction, abdominal hernia and chronic pain, they said.
[…]
Magnets are banned in New Zealand?
Banning teenagers was considered less practical.
It did have a higher popular support tho.
The post States that the subject of the band are the small magnets.
Reading comprehension is going to be the end of us.
There’s a lot of worse things that could be the end of us…zombie kittens, for example
Some like Bucky Balls are banned in the USA as well.
now they’ll never know how they work.
Was scratching my head wondering what got him into swallowing so many of those magnets for no other logical reason in the first place, except maybe because of some online Tiktok dare where logic is thrown out of the window.
Free bus rides. Just stick to the side.
The real question that remains unanswered: why the fuck did that boy try to earn a Darwin Award? One or two would be an accident, 100 is done on purpose
Nearest I can imagine is that he wanted to have a magnetic spot on his stomach for party tricks/TikToks.
MagSafe bellybutton.
I get an unsupervised toddler eating something they shouldn’t have been able to get to in the first place…
A 13 years old should at least have a functional brain.
Not all of them do, especially mentally unwell children or ones with developmental disorders
I would like to remind you of Tide pods, planking, and ghost riding the wip.
Not fair to through planking in there.
Planking was just lying down on things, so hardly an instance of teenagers endangering themselves.
The tide pod thing wasn’t exactly what it seemed to be. Some children with learning disabilities and some people with dementia had died from mistaking laundry pods for food. At some point, some media outlets decided to sensationalise it by leaving out the bit about learning disabilities. That meant that there were teenagers who thought other teenagers had died from eating them, so they could make videos pretending they’d done that, just like teenagers have staged videos to make it look like they’re doing dangerous things that they aren’t really doing ever since people have let them have cameras. Some of them decided that the easiest way to pretend was to put a real laundry pod in their mouth, pretend to chew it and swallow, pretend to die, and then cut the video and spit it out. If they checked the relevant warnings on the packet, they just said not to eat them and to rinse their eyes if they got any there, so this plan might seem safe. However, laundry pods are so corrosive against mucous membranes that putting one in your mouth and spitting it out immediately because it starts to burn immediately can still be fatal or cause permanent injury. The media reported the deaths and injuries as if teenagers were intentionally eating laundry pods, rather than pretending in a way the packet implied might be safe, so most people weren’t learning that pretending was also deadly and that the warnings on the packet weren’t exhaustive, so it just made fake tide pod challenge videos even more tempting. If the reporting had been more responsible, then most people would have first heard even pretending to eat laundry pods can kill rather than teenagers are eating laundry pods.
I only knew snippets of this as well even years later so I appreciate the rundown. Thanks for typing it up!
I’m sorry, but it’s a teenager. He’s at the point where it’s his body, his choice. I say let him die or digest them. Natural selection trying it’s best and being thwarted for extreame cases is bad.
I am almost afraid to ask… but why eat magnets?
Pica?
How else is he going to get out all the metal shards he ate?! It’s like if a bird gets stuck in the wall and you use a cat to get the bird out!
What are you smoking and can I have some, please?
I think the kid might’ve been avoiding hardware disease
They do that by feeding cows magnets.
(no but seriously 100 small magnets on purpose is something else)
Of course, you just gotta wrestle the bag from the racoon!
Not gonna lie, banning 5x2mm magnets is insane. They’re very useful, I’ve seen countless DIY projects or 3D print models that use them and in general they’re just handy. It seems insane to me to ban them for such a reason. There are infinite ways in which children can hurt themselves, should we ban stoves because they can get hot? That ban sounds a bit too much to me.
The ban was specifically in the context of toys.
We banned toy magnets. Magnets for other purposes are still completely legal.
Exactly. I never heard of a magnet ban in my life.
Bucky Balls were banned in the USA for 4 or 5 years.
But how do they work?
“You can’t explain that.” ~ Bill O’Reilly
Magnetic field comes in and field comes out. You can’t explain that
Fucking christ NZ can’t even have magnets?!
That sounds like something the british would do.
Well hearing Trump rant against magnets might happen to the US soon as well
Given the level of unchecked malice we’re facing at the hands of said government, I expect more edible magnets to suddenly become available.
I’m sure that’s next on his list lmao.
I have very little sympathy for any 13 year old dumb enough to eat magnets. I have zero sympathy for any 13 year old that ate a hundred of them.
It didn’t say in the article but would you have empathy if he was special needs. Because I am also at a loss for how a non special needs child could eat hundreds of magnets
I kinda get it. These things come as a cylinder. He didn’t so much swallow 100 individual magnets, but rather swallowed a complete cylinder package of them. The x-ray tends to confirm that.
Still, if you’re 13 years old, you’re old enough to understand why you shouldn’t swallow everything in front of you.
Yea I feel like Temu is not at fault here, but rather, a lack of parents and a lack of brain
How do we know this wasnt a stupid TikTok trend like the forbidden fruit/tidepod thing?
Maybe ban or actively filter that shit first?
That’s on dumb parents sticking a tablet or a phone in their kids face before they can even learn to walk, so they don’t have to engage with them or put any effort towards raising them, such people should stop reproducing and the world will be a better place for it
Another massive brain skill issue, lack of education, and no parents
It wasn’t illegal to eat dirt and worms when I was a kid, but my parents told me not to, so I didn’t.
You don’t need the governments controlling children through laws. Parents have that role. And education. End of story.
Reading helps.
The magnets, which have been banned in New Zealand since January 2013, were bought on online shopping platform Temu.
As an older Queer, i gotta tell you “They are bad because it’s illegal” is not a good argument
It’s bad that they shipped them to a place where they’re illegal.
But if it’s illegal that must mean it’s bad?
Ok now that we established that I have to go mindlessly coagulate in front of my 60th re-run of NCIS.
And? If you need to ban magnets country wide, the issue is probably the country’s education system, not the magnets or the seller of the magnets.
You know what else helps? Having a brain, and parents that aren’t incompetent.
Yeah, having a brain is generally helpful. Just think before you type.
Low quality ragebait
No it’s still parents and brain related.
What the hell is wrong with NZ? Are they trying to out nanny-state the UK?
And they laugh at the USA because Kinder eggs with toys in them are banned.
They’re laughing at USA for other reasons, mate.
Well sure, but we’re also laughing about the kinder egg thing.
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I like to think as the surgeons were removing the magnets they asked themselves “Magnets, how do they work?”
They should have just dunked him in water. Problem solved. /s
Wet magnets are the most useless thing ever.
How is Temu allowed to sell items which are explicutly banned in that country?
https://www.productsafety.govt.nz/for-consumers/using-products-safely/small-high-powered-magnets
The ban does not apply to: hardware magnets magnets used for teaching, or magnets that are (or are intended to become) parts of other products.
NZ banned toys from having magnets like this, but not complete magnets sold for general purposes. The article is misleading.
Which is also more reasonable than banning it across the board.
I don’t know if this is the same loophole used in NZ as in the UK and EU, but in the UK and EU, lots of things are banned from retail rather than completely illegal. If they’re imported and the importer sells them without demonstrating that they’re safe, the importer has committed a crime. If the importer keeps them for personal use, that’s fine, though. In theory, people ordering things from outside the EU and importing them are supposed to be aware that they’re importing things and that the stores aren’t necessarily only selling CE-marked goods, so they’re responsible for checking that they’re safe themselves, but in practice, people just see an online shop and don’t make a distinction from a domestic online shop except the price and delivery time. The EU is working on a law to close this loophole in some way.
By shifting the responsibility to the seller. temu is just a marketplace, the sellers are people who run the factories or their fulfillment center.
Customs cannot possibly scan every package coming in.
Parcel gets marked as childs toy.
Honestly pretty good chance it gets through.
Even I know not to eat magnets ffs.
And you’re a dumbass
Damn, ain’t seen your name for a while.
Exactly!
