this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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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.

[...]

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 72 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

[–] AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FahrenheitGhost@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I would like to remind you of Tide pods, planking, and ghost riding the wip.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FahrenheitGhost@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

That's a good point and I appreciate the details. The only one that I can really remember is exactly that. A kid who popped in his mouth and it burst on accident.

[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

I only knew snippets of this as well even years later so I appreciate the rundown. Thanks for typing it up!

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not fair to through planking in there.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think they are referring to people who did it in incredibly stupid places. There were planking fatalities, falls from cliffs and balconies. Darwin award winners.

[–] FahrenheitGhost@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah. Exactly that. I'm thinking of the ones who were falling off the balconies. I know that they were very small minority, but I felt it was still an example.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I must've been checked out by then, cause I only saw people doing it in real life. And it was usually pretty safe spots around the university I was at att.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I think the vast majority weren't in that dumb of places, though I bet there were a ton of smaller injuries that didn't make the news, because the whole point of the trend was to do it in shocking or obnoxious places (at least for the ones trying to go viral). But I'd guess the majority of people who did it weren't trying to go viral but just trying to fit in and applied some common sense to it.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Not all of them do, especially mentally unwell children or ones with developmental disorders

[–] Rcklsabndn@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nearest I can imagine is that he wanted to have a magnetic spot on his stomach for party tricks/TikToks.

[–] Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 week ago

MagSafe bellybutton.