Lithium battery: do not eat

[Sergeant Pluck]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-29610570

I never knew that - it's not what is in the battery that is the problem, it's the effect of the current.

[Charlotte]

Not surprisingly, I didn't know that either and given the sheer quantity of camera and bike related cells I get through, I shall be super-careful from now on.

[hellymedic]

I knew button batteries were potentially lethal because (surprise, surprise) they make electricity, which can cause electrolytic harm.
I have not worked for 11 years now.
This is not news.

What is news is that these dangers have be known for ages and there has been scant publicity regarding them.

We are all responsible: A&E staff, paediatricians, battery manufacturers, toy manufacturers (maybe not; they keep small, swallowable bits away from small kids) childcare folk etc.

[Kim]

Battery-hoarding audiologists

[Cudzoziemiec]

I would never have thought that a button battery would generate enough current to cause harm, nor that it could lead to a build up of sodium hydroxide. I would have thought that the biggest danger in swallowing a battery was choking.

[hellymedic]

The small, electrically flat, batteries usually pass unchanged from mouth to anus.

Choking can be a problem with anything a child might inhale (BIC pen tops were changed after a few tragic accidents.)

Larger batteries can get jammed in the gullet because they are too large to pass easily. They can cause electrolytic damage here (and, I postulate may have also caused some initial abrasive trauma).

Kids need to be kept away from things they can put into their mouths until they are sufficiently mature to understand.

[barakta]

My friend's child was suspected of swallowing a battery like that. It was treated very seriously, Xrays and poo checking with a 2 day "if no poo we're GAing child to stick probes into her"...  Fortunately it turned out child hadn't actually eaten batteries although mum is a hearing aid user.

Are Zinc Air batteries a problem as well as Lithium ones? 

[Sergeant Pluck]

I knew button batteries were potentially lethal because (surprise, surprise) they make electricity, which can cause electrolytic harm.

I was totally unaware of electrolytic damage despite being the sort of person that has a curiosity about such things. Oobviously I knew eating batteries was a bad idea, but I had always assumed that the mechanism of injury would be leakage of the contents, airway or GI obstruction.

The risk to kids definitely needs a higher profile. Good on the Beeb for the article. The first part emphasises lithium batteries - presumably the risk applies to all button batteries including zinc-air hearing aid batteries?

[Sergeant Pluck]

Are Zinc Air batteries a problem as well as Lithium ones? 

Great minds...

Depending on the answer I’ll modify the thread title.

[hellymedic]

I think so.
Kim might well know more about their capacity in AmpHours and voltage than I.

[barakta]

She's in the shower, will ask her when she gets out.

As a child, my hearing aid batteries were mercury...

[hellymedic]

She's in the shower, will ask her when she gets out.

As a child, my hearing aid batteries were mercury...

And I bet your carers made sure you didn't put them in your mouth.

[barakta]

I remember being VERY annoyed by the time I started school age just-under-5 at not being allowed to change my own flipping batteries. I had to go and ask to be excused from class (while not being able to hear natch) and find the receptionist and ask her for the battery packed to change the batteries. The staff didn't know how (despite being shown) but were terrified that I couldn't or would eat the batteries.

I guess if the batteries are that dangerous it's not the deaf child who is the issue, it's the slightly stupid 5 year old friend/classmate who eats the battery for some reason...

My mum was fairly not-obsessive about 'dangerous' things and children but we happened not to be the sort of bleach drinking, paracetamol chugging children.  We knew about medicines and that sweets and medicines were different. My batteries were kept in a special wooden box with spares and I didn't eat them, cos then I wouldn't be able to hear.  Dud ones had to be returned to get new ones so they went in the packet upside down and once the packet was all dud the slidey cardboard lid was put back on upside down with DUD written on it.  They didn't have sticky tabs on them when I was quite small - not sure when the tabs happened.  I learned to determine which were live and which were dud by temperature/other features if I dropped them while changing them...

Hearing aid batteries get into all sorts of crevices as do their stickers. I have 3 dead batteries on my desk alone and there's probably more lurking somewhere.

[tiermat]

Indeed, hearing aid batteries seem to have an afterlife all of their own. If you ever in my car and hear a rattle, it is probably an escapee.

[aidan.f]

zinc air hearing aid batteries will be lower hazard if swallowed as they stop producing energy, so no electrolytic damage , no air inside you.

[Sergeant Pluck]

A good point.

I dread to think of the number of mercury and zinc-air batteries I have littered the planet with in 45 years of hearing aid wearing.

Mind you the first ones I had, in about 1969 / 70, were about the size of a pack of fags, and used a battery about the size of an AA, so no danger of swallowing those. Something like this:

http://www.hearingaidmuseum.com/gallery/Transistor%20(Body)/Philips/info/philipskl6510.htm

The Royal Victoria’s audiology dept. must have been a bit behind the times. I was using ones like the above up until about 1971 or 2.

[mrcharly-YHT]

It is amazing what kids will eat. I ate over 100 aspirin tablets when I was 2.5.

[Charlotte]

Definitely a bad idea to teach your small person to verify that this sort of battery still has some zing in it with the touch-it-to-your-lips lest.

Mind you the first ones I had, in about 1969 / 70, were about the size of a pack of fags, and used a battery about the size of an AA, so no danger of swallowing those. Something like this:

http://www.hearingaidmuseum.com/gallery/Transistor%20(Body)/Philips/info/philipskl6510.htm

Reading that link...

Bottom view of the Philips Model KL-6510 showing a single AA sized battery in the battery compartment.

That's not "about the size of an AA" that *is* an AA.  Have they really been A Thing for over forty years?  I'm staggered!

[L CC]

It is amazing what kids will eat. I ate over 100 aspirin tablets when I was 2.5.

No1Son & No1Daughter spent a night in A&E following a 'how tasty are firelighters?' incident. For the curious: not very, apparently.

[mrcharly-YHT]

It is amazing what kids will eat. I ate over 100 aspirin tablets when I was 2.5.

No1Son & No1Daughter spent a night in A&E following a 'how tasty are firelighters?' incident. For the curious: not very, apparently.

It's quite impressive that they ate enough to warrant a hospital visit. After one nibble, did they think the second would taste better?
I've swallowed petrol (sucking on a hose to syphon it from 200l drum into car). Petrol burps are really disgusting.

[Cudzoziemiec]

There used to be orange flavoured aspirin for kids, designed to be palatable. They were withdrawn after some children found them too tasty. I always preferred the taste of normal aspirin anyway. I'm impressed by anyone being able to eat 100 though - impressed in a rather scary way.

[hellymedic]

Tablets for many medicines are now blister-packed, working on the principle that kids give up extracting tablets after a while.
Small kids could down large numbers of tablets when they were in 'childproof' bottles that many could outwit.
But kids CnBA to fiddle with feckin blister packs for long enough to take toxic quantities of many medicines.
Calpol infant suspension is sufficiently dilute for most accidental ingestion to be innocuous.

[Kim]

That's not "about the size of an AA" that *is* an AA.  Have they really been A Thing for over forty years?  I'm staggered!

A fair bit more than that, I'll wager.  The 'A' and 'B' battery designation dates from the early valve radio days (referring to those designed to provide the heater coil supply and bias voltage respectively), and I expect the naming for the IEC standard sizes (which themselves date back to the 50s) somehow evolved out of that.

I'd query whether a 1960s transistor-based hearing aid would be powered by a single 1.5V cell, though.  To me that seems implausibly low, and I'd suspect it's a multi-cell tubular battery or some exotic chemistry of roughly the same physical size.

[barakta]

I suspect "behind the ear aids" weren't very common in the UK pre 1970s and would have been much more expensive so probably reserved for people who couldn't manage with box-aids etc. 

I think one reason we had to return batteries in the 1980s was so they could recycle the mercury, when they switched to Zinc Air they kept the tradition but just disposed of them more safely. They were worried about fire hazard if lots of batteries are left together.

[Si_Co]

<SNIP> They were worried about fire hazard if lots of batteries are left together.

*thinks about contents of large plastic tub under stairs*

nope- that's not a fire hazard, its an ecological disaster waiting to happen