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.

[…]

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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)

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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        1 day ago

        Well I did! But I didnt wrestle the raccoon, I helped him get some more from a greedy cigar smoking capitalist aardvark, then we danced to this all night.

        Of course when I woke up there was just a bunch of dead raccoons around me and I was wearing a shirt that said ‘nyuk nyuk nyuk’ with the three stooges… something tells me I might have already been high the whole time!