Doctors Discover Girl's 'Chronic Cough' Was a Toothpaste Cap in Her Lung

A little girl's extended and unexplained cough was found to have a very strange cause after she was taken to hospital.

The 7-year-old, from Encarnación in Paraguay, had been coughing for 20 days straight for no apparent reason. When doctors at the Hospital Regional de Encarnación examined her via bronchoscopy and X-ray, looking inside her airways and lungs, they discovered that she had a toothpaste cap lodged inside.

"A 7-year-old girl, from Encarnación, was saved thanks to timely medical intervention after she arrived in the hospital with a chronic cough lasting 20 days," Hospital Regional de Encarnación wrote in a translated Facebook post sharing images of the strange finding.

"After being examined through a bronchoscopy, it is diagnosed that the cause of this situation was due to a strange body blocking the airways," the Paraguayan hospital added.

The post said how initially the doctors had no idea what the foreign object inside the girl could be. Only once they had removed it, did they realise that it was in fact a toothpaste cap, something that the girl must have swallowed and inhaled.

Toothpaste caps and other small objects pose a risk to young children. Often, the child may accidentally swallow it, possibly leading to major blockages of the airways and perhaps choking.

Visits to the emergency room after children swallow objects—also known as foreign-body ingestions—have nearly doubled since the 1990s, rising from 9.5 per 10,000 children under age 6 to 18 per 10,000. This study was published in 2019 in the journal Pediatrics. The most commonly swallowed objects include toys and coins, according to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The most dangerous objects to swallow include batteries, as they can cause vicious chemical burns inside the child, and sharp objects such as screws and nails, which can cause cuts and perforations inside the digestive tract. Additionally, any object that could block the child's airways poses a huge risk, as this might become lodged inside and lead to asphyxiation.

Sometimes, objects don't cause choking or serious damage, and instead just get lodged inside the body, just like what happened to the Encarnación girl. One other example of this happened in 2020 in China, when a 7-year-old girl was found to have an 0.8-inch pen cap stuck inside her right lung.

Luckily for the Encarnación girl, the cap has now been removed, and she looks set to make a full recovery. "The patient is currently improving," the post read.

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