Drinking the wrong oil to burn incense, a 17-month-old child is in critical condition

When the incident happened, because the family did not immediately take the child to the medical facility, but arbitrarily caused the child to vomit improperly, which made the child’s condition even worse.

Typically, the case of a child with PD (17 months old, Quang Ninh) was hospitalized on April 28. According to PD’s mother, during the holidays, the family went to relatives’ houses in Thai Binh to play. When there was no adult around, she drank the oil bottle to light the altar lamp on the floor.

“As soon as the incident happened, we panicked, gave him a lot of water and pulled his throat to make him vomit. After that, the family took him to the district level for first aid and then brought him to Thai Binh Provincial Hospital for 3 days for treatment because of difficulty breathing. But her pneumonia was more severe, so she had to go to the central level,” said PD’s mother.

The child’s relatives also did not expect that the act of causing vomiting made the baby’s condition worse.

Explaining this, BSCKII. Le Thanh Chuong – Head of the Department of Respiratory Resuscitation, Respiratory Center, National Children’s Hospital, said that the most serious complication and highest risk of death of mistakenly drinking oil for lighting is respiratory failure. The treatment of accidental ingestion of lighting oil is not the same as that of other liquids.

“We absolutely must not hook the throat to induce vomiting when the airway is not protected. Lighting oil is a volatile hydrocarbon with low surface tension, so it is easy to leak into the airways when swallowed, especially when causing vomiting. When entering the airways, the oil will spread very quickly in the lungs, causing mucosal necrosis, atelectasis and pneumonia,” said Dr. Accordingly, relatives only do gastric lavage in children who drink a large amount of oil and must do it at a medical facility after the child’s airway has been protected from oil penetration, for example, intubation must be performed first. when washing.

The same case is that baby VA (20 months, Bac Giang) was also hospitalized on May 3 in a state of cyanosis, respiratory failure, and had to breathe oxygen because he drank the wrong oil to burn incense. The incident took place when the child climbed up to the 2nd floor to play and saw a bottle of C2 soft drink on the window next to the altar. After drinking, the baby screamed, the family discovered that it was oil for the lamp.

Due to being subjective, seeing that the child had no symptoms, the family did not take the baby to a medical facility. After a few hours, seeing that the child vomited a lot, accompanied by a cough, the family took the child to the doctor in a state of fatigue.

Fortunately, the family did not manually induce vomiting or give the baby liquid to dilute the oil. After breathing oxygen and taking antibiotics for 7 days, up to now, the child has returned to normal breathing, but eating is still poor, the lung condition is still damaged.

According to doctors at the National Children’s Hospital, basically cases like this one will be able to make a full recovery. Some cases of oil choking have serious complications that may affect their health later on, and need to be continued by a doctor.

Those are 2 out of 5 children admitted to the National Children’s Hospital because they drank the wrong oil. Although all 5 children came to the hospital with respiratory failure requiring oxygen, which is life-threatening, but after appropriate treatment, all children were stable. The children had no respiratory failure, no infection, and lung damage recovered, and were discharged from the hospital one by one.

Ngoc Trang