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.
[…]
I am so confused. Why did he eat them? Magnets are banned in New Zealand since 2013? Are they marketed as special eating magnets?
yeah like this post is so weird lol
it kind of feels like a dream news
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.
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.
That’s unusual for a teenager to do, I’m curious why he did that. My first guess would be a developmental delay vs a dare?
Teens eat Tide pods on what’s essentially a dare.
Most of those occured after mainstream reporting. Usually it goes like this, some weird trend happens online, some real, some ironic, some making fun of said trend as if they were real, mainstream media picks up the story and signal boosts to the rest of the country, teens see the trend on clips of the news story and copies it, boom sudden epidemic of said trend. These trends, or memes suddenly propogate with great effect, not unlike a biological spread really.
Pica?
How else does one become magneto?
Teens are dumb.
That’s true. But they don’t normally eat 100 magnets.
Just laundry tabs. Lol
adults these days are also fucking stupid and incompetent
god I fucking love generalisations
All generalisations are great.
🥇
The brain is not fully developed till your 30’s.
teenagers are fucking stupid. never forget that.
when i was a teenager, my friend and I got into a BB gun fight without any eye protection, i nearly lost an eye.
Do you still see eye to eye with them today?
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
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.
Bullshit propaganda to try to soften age restrictions coming in to fkin everything.
Where they banned in all their various applications? Because I had a scare when my 2-year-old granddaughter found a box with a magnetic latch and the magnet had been torn out. We thought she ate it. But after scouring the area we found it, and it’s a thin neodymium magnet. Went through the whole house making sure boxes like that were out of her reach.
Magnets are banned in New Zealand?
Banning teenagers was considered less practical.
now they’ll never know how they work.
Some like Bucky Balls are banned in the USA as well.
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
I think the post actually stated ‘banned’, not band.
And actually it’s auto correct that will be the end of us.
How is Temu allowed to sell items which are explicutly banned in that country?
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 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.
I have … hmm … questions … but I guess a ban was in order … I mean given the … circumstances … but why!?
So, New Zealanders can’t magnetize their Warhammer minis? What do they do if there are rule changes that affect their unit loadout? This is a human rights abuse!
I wonder why they banned them. Were a lot of children eating then? What do you do if you need a small powerful magnet?
I think the post actually stated ‘banned’, not band.
And actually it’s auto correct that will be the end of us.
