New Zealand teen swallows online magnets, requires major surgery

A 13-year-old boy in New Zealand underwent major surgery after ingesting about 80 to 100 small, high-powered magnets he had bought online, doctors reported. The boy was admitted to Tauranga Hospital on the North Island after four days of abdominal pain; scans showed the magnets had clustered into four chains inside his intestines, causing areas of tissue death that required removal, surgeons said in a case report published in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

Hospital staff told researchers that the magnets, each about 5 by 2 millimetres and made of neodymium, had attracted across loops of bowel, pinching tissue between them and producing pressure necrosis. Surgeons removed the magnetic pieces and resected the damaged sections of intestine. The unnamed teenager spent eight days in hospital before being discharged. The authors warned that patients who undergo this type of surgery can later experience complications such as bowel obstruction, hernias or chronic abdominal pain.

According to the case report, the boy said he purchased the magnets on the online marketplace Temu roughly a week before his hospitalization. Temu issued a statement saying it could not yet confirm whether the...