Little girl not even two years old, killed by magnetic balls. The long road from symptoms to concrete diagnosis, in Germany / The child’s mother’s message to parents / What ANPC representatives say about the safety of toys

A two-year-old girl died after ingesting magnetic balls. The girl’s family is from Romania, but has been living in Germany for 12 years. The child’s mother told News.ro how she ended up ingesting the balls and everything that happened, from the first symptoms and the diagnosis of enterocolitis to the establishment of the real cause of the sufferings, the surgical intervention and the septicemia that caused the death. “Don’t buy something like that, if the sale of these magnets could be prohibited by law, they are so dangerous. If there is one, it can be removed, but if there are two, they can block the stomach and without an MRI they cannot be observed”, is the woman’s message for parents.

The girl’s family is from Romania but has been settled in Germany for 12 years. The mother of the child who died due to some magnetic balls that she ingested after someone left them in the family’s home told News.ro the nightmare she has been living since last year, on November 19.

“Our one-year-old and 8-month-old girl started having diarrhea, we went to the doctor, samples were taken, which revealed an infection, but they associated the infection with enterocolitis,” said the girl’s mother.

In December, however, the girl went to the doctor again. A medical team from Germany told the mother that it was enterocolitis that reappeared after the one in November, without collecting other samples, the child’s mother claims.

“They considered that it was all about enterocolitis, only that he had it once and at a certain time it got re-infected, that’s why it lasts so long,” said the child’s mother.

However, the child started to have a fever, also in December of last year. During the winter holidays, the family took her to the hospital again. The child was hospitalized for 3 days, a stool sample was taken, in which, according to the mother, the presence of only a certain bacteria was checked, the test for which the girl came out negative. Blood tests did not indicate an infection. The problems were not going to end here, says the child’s mother.

“I left the hospital still with diarrhea, the girl had started to have diarrhea again in the hospital. I got home, the little girl started kindergarten, she went for a week and after a few days the little girl started vomiting. After he came from the kindergarten, he started vomiting including the water he drinks, and he drinks a lot of water, somewhere around 250 ml of water at a time, which he vomits in the next few minutes. We went to the pharmacy, bought some vomiting suppositories, which we administered and on Thursday morning we went to the pediatrician,” said the girl’s mother.

The pediatrician gave the child the same type of suppository, says the mother. But the girl did not feel well, again. The girl then returned to the hospital, where she was analyzed. The doctors said that the girl needs infusions because she is dehydrated and that they cannot do anything more. Upset that the doctors could not do more for the child, the mother refused hospitalization.

“I was very upset that they said the only thing they could do was give him an infusion and I asked for a thorough investigation and they didn’t want it. I came home with the little girl on Friday night. Friday evening I went to another hospital again, where he had a normal ultrasound and they realized that something was wrong with his stomach. They said that they are not specialists and sent us to another bigger hospital”, she explained.

At the largest state hospital in Germany, the doctors gave the girl three more ultrasounds and an MRI

“The doctor who did his last ultrasound asked me what color the vomit was. I told him to check and when he checked he realized that it was fecal matter and that it was supposed to go down through the bowels and not come back up and he said he had to have an emergency operation but I don’t know still why, they need to do an MRI.

When he did the MRI, he realized that our little girl swallowed 5 magnets of a very small size, we didn’t notice, we assume that she swallowed them in November, when she started having diarrhea. The magnets were bought on the internet by another person who was visiting us. They forgot about us. I wanted to send them, he said to leave them with us, for our children to play, considering that we have three other older children, I said that my children cannot play with something like that, that we have the little girl. The magnets, which were in number of 5… 3 remained in the stomach and 2 went down into the intestine and after two meters they stuck to the ones in the stomach and blocked the transit”, explained the mother of the two-year-old girl.

It was only after the MRI investigation that the girl’s family realized that the little one had been playing with a set of magnetic balls that someone had brought to their home. The child was operated urgently by a medical team, in the hospital where an MRI was performed, but unfortunately, after the operation, the girl developed septicemia and died shortly after.

“All the time we protected the magnets, we kept them somewhere two meters away, but we suspect that our almost ten-year-old boy took them to play without us noticing. The little girl swallowed them because our little boy was going to have his birthday in October and we bought some bottles with small, colorful candies, almost the size of magnets, from the store and our angel took them from the box. We didn’t notice, because if we noticed (ed. – the moment the little girl swallowed the magnets) we went to the doctor and an MRI was done on the spot.

Here it is very difficult to do MRI on small children, I wouldn’t say impossible to do, but very very difficult. After the death of our little girl, a meeting was held with 36 doctors and out of 36 doctors, having good blood results, none of them said that they would have done an MRI, they did not consider an MRI necessary, health is very important here babies, in terms of radiation, it is very difficult to do an MRI here, only if you ask for it explicitly and in our case we didn’t know, we didn’t realize, the family doctor having 38 years of experience in paediatrics, not -he realized that it is possible that such a small child has swallowed something”, said the child’s mother.

The message for parents, coming from the mother who lost her little girl last year

“Don’t buy something like that, if the sale of these magnets could be prohibited by law, they are so dangerous. If there is one, it can be removed, but if there are two, they can block the stomach and without an MRI they cannot be observed. They can be bought on the internet very easily, this is a problem and parents should be aware that once they have bought them, they can no longer supervise them because they are so small.

Such situations are rare, says pediatrician Mihai Gafencu from Timisoara. When they appear, the major danger can come rather from the substances with which the respective balls are wrapped, he explains.

“Usually the aspiration of the foreign body is the fatal one, the most dangerous ingestions we have faced are the micro batteries, because they, under the action of the gastric juice, disintegrate and their components are toxic. If you swallow a penny, a coin, a ball, a plastic thing, it doesn’t really have fatal consequences, here it has to be seen simply from the composition of the paints or their content, I think 5 or 6 were swallowed by that child. The major problem is when the control of this cap between breathing and digestion is not good and then with the inspiratory stage they reach the trachea, those are the alert situations for new paediatricians, more than the digestive ones, except for this situation”, he told News. ro Dr. Mihai Gafencu, primary pediatrician at the Louis Ţurcanu Children’s Emergency Clinical Hospital in Timisoara.

Sebastian Hotca, ANPC vice-president, explained that there is legislation in the field and that parents have a great responsibility when choosing toys for children

“We have legislation in the field, it is GD 74/2011 (no. regarding toy safety) where all these situations are regulated, that’s why parents must be extremely careful, read the instructions for use very carefully when buying such toys, if they are suitable for the age of the child for whom they are buying the respective toy.

We have repeatedly notified products that come from China, for example, products that were extremely dangerous, at the level of the European Union to ban these products, that’s why we address first of all the parents who buy these toys. We are in the market, we check, whenever we have the opportunity, whether the stores that sell such products have put all this information on the product label opposite the correct, complete and precise information of the consumer”, the ANPC vice-president told News.ro.

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