Toy beads puncture girls intestine: Chinese surgeons remove 61 magnetic beads from tummy of child

Doctors in eastern China had to remove 61 magnetic beads from the belly of a four-year-old girl and patch up more than a dozen holes they had punched through the wall of her intestine, local media reported.

The beads – the size of soybeans which together make a popular educational toy – were found inside the child, named Xiaoyou, when she was X-rayed at a hospital in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province over the weekend.

The little girl had been suffering repeated bouts of stomach ache for the past month, the City Express said.

Such was the number and density of the magnetic beads, she had to undergo three hours of surgery to remove them because less invasive forms of treatment would not have worked, doctor Chen Qingjiang from The Children’s Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, who was in charge of the case, was quoted as saying.

The little magnetic balls, which doctors suspect she had swallowed on different occasions, were attracted to each other after they arrived in different parts of her intestinal tract, leading them to stick together and cause perforations.

“After we released adhesions we discovered 14 holes. We repaired them one by one and it all went smoothly. But to the child, the operation was still a major trauma,” the doctor said.

She is now recovering, but faces a higher risk of intestinal adhesion and obstruction in future as a result of her ordeal, Chen added.

Xiaoyou’s parents had no idea she had eaten the pellets and was shocked to see the X-ray.

They said she had been complaining about stomach ache for as long as a month before they took her to the hospital.

The magnetic beads can be bought easily both online and offline in stores as a creativity development toy which allows children to build different structures.

But their safety has been questioned after a series of recent swallowing cases.

Chen said his hospital dealt with 87 such cases by the end of last year.

“In 2020, when the beads were most popular, we ran into several such cases every month,” he said.

In 2020, doctors in Jinan, eastern China’s Shandong province, were astonished to find 190 magnetic beads stuffed in a five-year-old girl’s stomach.

Her family was aware that she ate the beads occasionally but only took her to the hospital after seeing a warning about the toys.

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