Be
careful the next time you eat a hamburger or other product cooked on an
outdoor grill. There could be danger lurking in the form of undetected
wire bristles left by grill-cleaning brushes. The problem is so serious
that the Center For Disease Control (CDC) recently issued a consumer warning.
The small wires can work their way into the hamburgers or other food
being grilled, and then into you. Such ingestions happen, and the
results are not only extremely painful but deadly if not treated
immediately, usually with emergency surgery.
Six cases were identified at one hospital system from March, 2011 to
June, 2012. All six reported outdoor residential food grilling and use
of commercially available wire grill-cleaning brushes. Injuries ranged
from puncture of the soft tissues of the neck, causing severe pain when
swallowing, to perforation of the gastrointestinal tract. Severe pain on
swallowing was the chief symptom in three of the six patients. In all
three of these patients, a wire bristle from a grill-cleaning brush was
found in the neck. Two patients underwent emergency abdominal surgery to
retrieve the foreign object and repair the intestine. In one patient,
the wire had not perforated the intestine and was removed via
colonoscopy.
TO PREVENT SUCH OCCURRENCES,
examine the grill surface carefully before grilling for bristles that may have dislodged
from the brush and could then embed in cooked food.
Man! Those bristles are the best part of some grilled burgers!
ReplyDeleteNaw, I suppose this really isn't a laughing matter. I'll be careful of what I grill but I'm not sure how to inspect my neighbors' burgers at the next block party. Portable metal detector?
Never would have considered this to be a potential hazard. I'm throwing away the grill brush.
ReplyDeleteHay,get you a $1.oo wire brush at Harbor Freight and use it only for cleaning the grill. It has brissels over one inch long that would be hard not to see on the grill and probably even harder to swallow. By GlennL
ReplyDelete