An episode in the life of one family in Jiangsu Province seemed to be normal, even sweet.
Doing some shopping, a young mother remembered to buy her daughter some candies. When she got home, the father volunteered to feed their child with the said candies.
Doting parents. One lucky child.
It turned out however that the supposed candies were not candies at all. They were not even edible in the first place.
The mother mistook a pack of multicolored water-absorbing balls, also called water babies or spitballs, as candies. The unknowing father likewise dismissed them as colorful sweets, giving their 3-year-old daughter more than 280 pieces, according to Sina.
Given the tiny size of the candy-like water babies, there would be no difficulty on the part of the child to consume a lot in a brief span of time.
The mother said that she bought the water babies at the entrance of a supermarket. According to her, the water babies looked similar to the candies their daughter likes.
At home, her husband fed their child the water babies while she did some chores. She said that he placed the water babies on the palm of his hand and, one by one, put them into their daughter’s mouth.
She later saw a piece on the floor. She picked it up to eat.
That was when she learned it was not a kind of candy she bought but water babies.
Knowing that water babies expand when placed in liquid, she and her husband rushed their daughter to Shuyang County Hospital. They later transferred her to Huai’an City Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital in Qingpu.
Good thing, according to the attending physician, the water babies had not yet increased in size by the time the child got admitted in the hospital.
To expel the water babies, the doctor administered a drug that would lead to peristalsis, which is, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the “involuntary movements of the longitudinal and circular muscles, primarily in the digestive tract.”
More than 200 pieces of water babies were initially expelled. In the next 24 hours, the remaining ones followed.
The father said that their daughter was subjected to intravenous therapy because she was not yet allowed to drink and eat.
Water-absorbing balls go by various names: superabsorbent polymer ball, polymer ball, water beads, water beads gel, hydrogel beads, water jelly and magic crystal soil, among others.
A 3.5-centimeter superabsorbent ball was extracted from the intestine of an 8-month-old female infant, according to the article, “Water-Absorbing Balls: A ‘Growing’ Problem,” published in Oct. 2012 by Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The infant swallowed it after it was mistaken as a candy. It was actually “a part of her older sister’s toy made from an expanding polymer ball.”
The authors of the articles warned people, particularly parents, about water-absorbing balls as these things “pose a public health concern.”
“We speculate that this problem may increase in incidence as a cursory look at department stores suggests that the use of superabsorbent polymer technology is becoming more prevalent in toys, gardening equipment, and other household products,” they wrote.