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.
[…]
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
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.
I would like to remind you of Tide pods, planking, and ghost riding the wip.
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.
Fucking christ NZ can’t even have magnets?!
That sounds like something the british would do.
I am almost afraid to ask… but why eat magnets?
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!
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.
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.
Exactly. I never heard of a magnet ban in my life.
But how do they work?
“You can’t explain that.” ~ Bill O’Reilly
What the hell is wrong with NZ? Are they trying to out nanny-state the UK?
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?
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
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.
How is Temu allowed to sell items which are explicutly banned in that country?
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.
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
And they laugh at the USA because Kinder eggs with toys in them are banned.
They’re laughing at USA for other reasons, mate.
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Even I know not to eat magnets ffs.
And you’re a dumbass
Exactly!
The degree ignorance and abomination of some of the comments here in this thread is another reason to not use Temu or a similar platform.
Not trying to defend temu, they are definitely careless enough to breach way bigger restrictions than this. However, don’t just ignore the rest of the context here.
- Almost no country bans small magnets
- Almost no child eats 100s of them
- It is easy for a store so vast to not know about a restriction so specific and so unusual
It’s unreasonable of you to only direct blame to Temu (which are know to be negligent and aggressive at testing the limits of what they can get away with) in this particular, unusual case.
Why are kids eating magnets now?
It increases the vibe
Six seven, obviously.
60-70* We have now changed the meme.
Bullshit propaganda to try to soften age restrictions coming in to fkin everything.
This is fucking stupid. A 13 year old is old enough to read the “don’t fucking eat this you dumbass” labels on the packaging. Do you know how useful neodymium magnets are? You’re gonna just ban them cuz this kid’s dumb enough to swallow a hundred fucking rare earth magnets and didn’t go to the doctor for half a week? Stupid
Magnets from Temu were probably just loose in a bag or some bubble wrap with no warning label. People should know they’re not food anyway, but defying a warning label wasn’t the particular flavour of dumbness exhibited here.
I had to double take at neodymium — wtf!!! Neodymium is completely standard for audio drivers, where the choice of the magnet is actually very important! My good old Philips 2XHR literally proudly advertise on the shell that they have a 50mm neodymium dynamic driver inside them… banning them is ridiculous
Yeah stop banning everything that can hurt you because ONE person does something stupid. Like we say in my language, one time is zero times. Everything can hurt you. If many people start doing it, maybe it’s time to consider a ban.
They’re banned since 2014 because apparently multiple people had the idea to eat them for whatever reason
What the shit aotearoa
Next they’re going to ban CR2032 button cells
(I was gonna put a /s at the end but I can vividly imagine that happening now :/ )
In Australia CR2032s have a double wall thick plastic blister packaging that is basically impossible to open.
You need scissors AND some time.
This is an example of a sensible control. Double walled, difficult to open packages may be a small inconvenience for adults, but it makes it near impossible for a toddler to open. Button cell batteries are seriously dangerous if swallowed.
Banning neodymium magnets is fucking stupid, and unfortunately the world seems to be heading in the direction of banning everything in the name of “safety”.
Same in the US, apparently. I bought some to replace my car key remote battery. Guess what I don’t have in my car? Any kind of scissors.
Not to harp on you but one of those old school keychain Swiss Army knives should be on your key ring
Knife
In public
Not looking for a stiff fine or gaol time. Yes, a Swiss Army Knife on your keyring is considered a dangerous weapon here too.
(Legally, there is an exception for Utility knives, if you ‘have a good reason’ but it’s never given, people have been fined for having box cutters)
Usually I carry a little Leatherman folding knife, but I didn’t grab it that morning because I was just stepping out to replace a battery. I didn’t expect it to be a whole ordeal.
Don’t forget the ink
Not sure if you’re aware, but Duracell and probably others coat button batteries in a chemical that tastes bad in order to discourage ingestion.
I see where these regulations are coming from, but we can’t just ban away anything that could be harmful. I just recently bought a bunch of magnets like these for a using in 3D printed models. I don’t have any kids, but I do have pets and so they’re stored away in their own case and not left around. People just need to be responsible. I mean, we don’t ban bleach but you sure as hell shouldn’t drink it!
I was at a company picknic this summer and was watching people trying to play a pitiful version of Lawn Darts. The darts were weighted but would just bounce off the ground and ruin a good shot. Lawn darts, or darts of any kind, simply don’t work as a game when you take the pointy end away. I will say though, that a company outing where there’s people milling about is not a good place to play lawn darts, so I wouldn’t have used the real ones here even if you could.
Proper product packaging, like we use in medicine canisters, and perhaps an extra disclaimer/waiver on purchase is the way to go on these things IMO.
Denatonoum Benzoate.
Intensely bitter compound used to prevent people from putting them into their mouths. Examples include nail polishes (to help nail biting habits), button cell batteries, and even Nintendo switch cartridges.
Denatonium - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium
Also if you’re having trouble with a low power devices with button cells. Wiping them down with isopropyl alcohol to clean off the bitter coating can help. Both my car keyfob and an AirTag both started working again after cleaning the brand new batteries.
The magnets, which have been banned in New Zealand since January 2013, were bought on online shopping platform Temu, they said They did not. One could argue that the ban may or may not make sense (preferably after looking up the specifics), but your statement is wrong.
I know the ban was before the event, you get what I meant.
