A boy who swallowed up to 100 high-powered magnets purchased online has undergone major surgery to remove them.
After four days of stomach pain, the 13-year-old boy was admitted to Tauranga Hospital on New Zealand’s North Island, where doctors discovered the magnets had joined together to form four chains inside his intestines.
Surgeons extracted the magnets and removed parts of the boy’s damaged intestines, according to a report by doctors at the hospital, published Friday in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
The boy, who was not identified in the report, had swallowed “approximately 80–100 5x2mm high-power neodymium magnets” a week prior to his hospitalization, the doctors said. He was discharged after spending eight days in the hospital.
New Zealand banned the sale of small, high-powered magnets in 2013, after the government warned that children could suffer serious injuries if they swallowed the magnets, whether out of curiosity or while playing with them as “mock jewellery.”
“Though these magnets tend to be marketed at adults as office toys and many brands carry strict safety warnings, it is clear from the cases here and overseas that they pose too great a risk to children,” Simon Bridges, then New Zealand’s consumer affairs minister, said in a statement at the time, citing previous child hospitalizations in the U.S. and Australia.
However, the authors of the New Zealand Medical Journal report noted that enforcing the long-standing ban remains challenging, as the magnets can still be easily purchased through online marketplaces.
“While these laws can be enforced locally, it is more difficult to regulate products supplied by overseas merchants on large-scale online marketplaces,” the authors said.
“These platforms are easily accessible especially by children, with purchases being inexpensive and not always requiring age verification,” they added.
The report said that the magnets had been purchased via the Chinese online marketplace Temu. In a statement to NBC News, Temu said it has not yet been able to confirm whether the magnets in question were purchased through its platform.
“We are sorry to learn about the reported incident and wish the boy a full and speedy recovery,” Temu’s spokespersons said.
“We take product safety very seriously and continuously monitor our platform to ensure sellers are complying with the safety regulations of the markets they are doing business in,” they said.
The marketplace platform said it has reached out to the New Zealand Medical Journal for more details on the case, and its teams are reviewing relevant listings to ensure they meet local safety standards, adding that any noncompliant products will be removed and sellers found violating platform rules or local laws will face firm action.
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