Five-year-old swallows 50-gram gold bar, needs emergency surgery in China

A five-year-old girl required emergency endoscopic surgery after accidentally swallowing a 50-gram gold bar while playing at home in northern China, Beijing Children's Hospital reported.

The child arrived at the Capital Medicine University-affiliated facility on August 16, six hours after ingesting the 4cm-long bar, with X-rays confirming it remained trapped in her stomach. Her family had already visited several clinics, none of which possessed the equipment needed for emergency endoscopic removal of foreign objects.

Critical surgical intervention

Doctors classified the girl's condition as critical because the hard, dense gold bar's smooth surface posed multiple dangers: it could easily lodge in the digestive tract, scratch the stomach lining, or cause perforation and severe bleeding.

The surgical team performed an intraoperative endoscopy and located the bar wedged inside her gastric cavity, where extremely narrow operating conditions meant even a minor error could have damaged the digestive tract lining.

'Gold-devouring beast' memes

The incident went viral on Chinese social media, with users joking that the child had taken too literally the popular mainland nickname for expensive children: "gold-devouring beasts". Chinese parents commonly use this sardonic term to describe the financial burden of raising children, making the literal gold consumption darkly ironic to online commentators.

Source: South China Morning Post