Child’s Life Threatened after Swallowing Magnetic Balls from TikTok Challenge

A six-year-old child underwent emergency surgery at Pirogov after "jokingly" swallowing magnetic balls because of a TikTok challenge, the emergency hospital announced. This is just one of the frequent cases in Bulgaria in the past months.

Maria swallows magnetic balls in response to a TikTok challenge in which she has to imitate a piercing in her mouth by placing balls with a diameter between 3 and 5 millimeters on her tongue. She took them from her big brother, who received them at school, in a lesson on the strength of magnets, reported a Facebook post from the page Mama Ninja.

The first symptoms, like stomach pain, appear a month and a half later. The problem is discovered only after an X-ray. The child was taken urgently from Burgas to Sofia and was operated on by Dr. Stefan Stoilov, head of the Department of Pediatric Abdominal Surgery at UMBALSM "Pirogov".

For Dr. Stoilov, this is another "magnetic" case. In the last few months, operations on children who swallowed balls during the popular game on social networks have become more frequent at Pirogov.

"Before Maria, we operated on another child, her age, for 7 hours. We removed 21 magnetic balls one by one and found that they caused 14 perforations in the gastrointestinal tract," says Dr. Stefan Stoilov.

According to him, these balls are incredibly dangerous for children's lives. They are difficult to diagnose, the symptoms appear late, and many doctors do not realize the seriousness of the problem.

The specialist explains that the balls are made of a very strong magnetic alloy. When they fall into the child's abdomen, they stick to each other, pierce the entire intestinal wall of nearby intestinal loops and form intestinal fistulas. The balls cannot...