Temu under fire as a New Zealand boy needed emergency surgery. He swallowed 100 magnets

A 13-year-old boy in New Zealand is recovering after surgeons removed up to 100 high-power magnets that he bought on Temu from his intestines. It’s hard to believe how negligent a major retailer can be, allowing a product that’s been banned for over a decade in that country to be sold directly to a child.

The new victim of Temu is a kid who suffered for four days with intense abdominal pain before he was finally rushed to Tauranga hospital. The report from the hospital doctors in the New Zealand Medical Journal makes it clear how serious this was: he “disclosed ingesting approximately 80 to 100 5x2mm high-power (neodymium) magnets about one week prior,” and what happened inside him is the stuff of nightmares.

The issue isn’t just that he swallowed them; kids do dumb things, to be fair, but what happens after they’re ingested. These aren’t your typical fridge magnets; we’re talking about neodymium magnets, which are top-tier in terms of magnetic force, even at their tiny 5x2mm size. An X-ray of the boy’s abdomen showed that all those magnets had clumped together into four straight lines inside his intestines.

This boy could have died painfully

It looks like they were trying to find each other, with the doctors noting that “These appeared to be in separate parts of bowel adhered together due to magnetic forces.” You’re probably picturing a single chain of magnets, but the terrifying reality is that magnetic forces pulled four separate parts of his bowel together. This created incredible pressure, causing what doctors call “necrosis,” tissue death, in four different spots of his small bowel and caecum, which is part of the large intestine.

Surgeons had to go in and remove all that dead tissue to retrieve the magnets. The complexity and horror of this surgery reminds us that buying these products on a platform like Temu is not safe.

These magnets have been banned in New Zealand since January 2013 because of this exact danger to the “paediatric population.” They’re illegal to sell, yet they were purchased without issue on Temu. It’s a classic example of an online marketplace not doing enough to crack down hard on dangerous or illegal products being listed by third-party sellers.

This Chinese-founded e-commerce company has been under fire in other markets, too, including the EU, for allegedly not doing its due diligence to rid its platform of illegal and unsafe goods. This case, sadly, proves the criticism is completely warranted. We’re not talking about a knock-off USB-C cable; we’re talking about an item that can, and did, cause internal injury requiring major surgery.

The immediate relief for the 13-year-old is that he was able to return home after spending eight days in the hospital recovering from the extensive surgery. Unfortunately, surgery for magnet ingestion can lead to complications later in life, such as chronic pain, abdominal hernia, and bowel obstruction. That’s a huge burden to put on a young person, all because a huge online store was too slow or too careless to remove an illegal, banned product.

When asked about the incident, Temu released a statement saying they were sorry to learn of the boy’s surgery which is the absolute least they could say. They claim they have “We have launched an internal review and reached out to the authors of the New Zealand Medical Journal article to obtain more details about the case.”