Lithium Penny Battery: Warning for Parents

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Surgeons at London’s Great Ormond Hospital, the UK’s largest pediatrics center have issued a health warning about lithium penny batteries. They do not only look like coins. To small kids they could look like sweets to suck. If accidentally swallowed they cause serious burns in delicate places with unfortunately severe results.

What a Lithium Penny Battery Did to a Three-Year-Old Girl

In 2015, a three-year-old girl swallowed a lithium penny watch battery in Northern Ireland. Five days later, she became ill and started refusing food. When doctors x-rayed her, they found the battery had burned a hole through her esophagus into her windpipe affecting her ability to breathe and swallow. Her surgeon says, “button batteries should therefore be treated like poison and kept out of reach of children.”

lithium penny
Image: Consumer Product Safety Commission

Valerie has spent the last nine months in hospital receiving specialist treatment and having part of her esophagus removed.

She can no longer eat and drink properly, and uses tubes. Out of respect to sensitive visitors, we won’t go any further.

If you want to know more about this sad story, search for “button batteries pose ‘deadly’ risk to toddlers” on the BBC and keep children and sensitive viewers away from the video. We want to explain the problem, not shock.

How Lithium Penny Batteries Become Dangerous When Swallowed

lithium penny
Image: Kelly Taylor

Great Ormond Hospital reports an uptick in these incidents. They were rare ten years ago. Now they admit an average of a child a month.

The moist esophagus membrane surrounds the battery creating an electrical circuit and allowing the current to flow. There have been cases where one burned a hole through a main artery causing the child to bleed to death.

Until lithium penny battery manufacturers implement a 2014 child-proof lithium battery invention, our kids will be at risk. We can’t be everywhere but we can take precautions. Where do you keep your new penny batteries and how do you dispose of them?

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I tripped over a shrinking bank balance and fell into the writing gig unintentionally. This was after I escaped the corporate world and searched in vain for ways to become rich on the internet by doing nothing. Despite the fact that writing is no recipe for wealth, I rather enjoy it. I will not deny I am obsessed with it when I have the time. I live in Margate on the Kwazulu-Natal south coast of South Africa. I work from home where I ponder on the future of the planet, and what lies beyond in the great hereafter. Sometimes I step out of my computer into the silent riverine forests, and empty golden beaches for which the area is renowned. Richard

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