What happens when a Child Swallows a Lithium Battery?

It's been all over the news in Ohio recently. A little one-year-old boy, healthy until that point in its life, suddenly completely refused to eat; he threw up when he did, and seemed to have an upper respiratory infection. Doctors just thought he had a virus. When nothing they did seemed to work for about 10 days, they called him in for an X-ray to check for pneumonia. The X-ray actually did turn out to be useful, though not in a way that they would have expected. It showed that the little child had somehow swallowed a little button lithium battery, the kind you find in a Casio watch, for instance. They performed surgery on the boy and it was removed. They thought that was the end of that, and now he could start getting better. That was where they were wrong.

The lithium battery, for the time that it was inside his body, appeared to have done quite a bit of damage. The battery was not a dead one; it contained charge. And when it was lodged inside, tightly packed between two surfaces inside his body, it began to pump out current into his delicate digestive system. The current burned through his internal organs, and pretty soon, he succumbed to his injuries.

Now outcomes this horrific, no one could expect. These batteries do lie about how sometimes, no one expects them to do this kind of damage. Little children think that it looks like candy, and older people who have Alzheimer's or something, sometimes think it is a pill. Poison control centers around the country say that there are a few thousand cases of lithium battery swallowing every year. Of course, people have been dealing with this kind of problem for quite a while now. What makes it especially dangerous now though is the fact that these batteries, small as they are, are getting more and more powerful. And the complications that come out of these cases is rising - about a hundred series once every year.

It isn't always death that lithium battery ingestion causes. Sometimes they trigger a chemical reacion, and it can destroy a child's voice. Sometimes it burns holes in the intestines. Is there a specific kind of lithium battery that you need to look out for? Well, that would be most of the popular models - the ones that begin with the numbers 2 and 0 in their model designations. Every company uses these models these days. You have them on your motherboards, your bathroom scales and remote controls. And when you put them in these devices, they don't always stay inside either. Sometimes they can just fall out. When the lithium battery in a remote control for a car stereo fell out in my neighbor's car once, his two-year-old went and swallowed it. He kept crying for days, and no one could understand what was wrong. They finally found out a week later in the hospital that it was one of these things, and they removed it. But it had done all kinds of damage to his digestive system; he kept vomiting, and the acid ruined his teeth.

It isn't only two-year-olds that have a problem with lithium batteries either. Children as old as five can do this on purpose. They'll just easily take them out of the remote control and hold them in their mouths. The unintended consequences you have with technology are numerous. Is there no way out of this?