Grilling? Watch out for wire bristles from cleaning brushes

Everyone who has ever painted knows that bristles can fall off the paint brush and mar your new surface. It probably should not be a great surprise, then, that bristles can come off a wire brush used for cleaning an outdoor grill, get taken up by food and ingested. Once in the throat or intestines, the bristles can cause serious damage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned this week in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

A team of physicians from Brown University’s Alpert School of Medicine reported that they had observed six cases of such injury between March 2011 and June 2012. All required invasive procedures to remove the offending metal.

One patient was a 50-year-old man who arrived at the ER complaining of pain after eating steak at a backyard barbecue. A CT scan revealed a metallic object penetrating the wall of his small intestine. The wire was surgically removed and the patient released the next day.

Two other patients, men ages 31 and 35, reported similar problems on different dates. Surgery was required to remove the offending bristle in one case. In the other, the bristle had not penetrated the intestine and was removed via colonoscopy.

Three other patients, a woman age 46 and two men, ages 50 and 64, reported difficulty swallowing. X-rays revealed the wire in the throat. All three wires were successfully removed by laryngoscopy.

The same team of physicians had previously reported an additional six cases from July 2009 to November 2010.

The number is relatively small compared with the estimated 80,000 ER visits in 2010 for ingestion of foreign objects, most of them among children. But the report from Brown suggests that ingestion of wire bristles might be more common than suspected.

The CDC warned that the bristles are small and often cannot be readily observed on conventional x-rays and CT scans, and it cautioned doctors to be alert for the problem when searching for the causes of unexplained abdominal or throat pain. The agency also cautioned consumers to be careful when cleaning grills to ensure that all bristles are removed.

Information was not available on the brand or type of brushes responsible for the incidents, nor on the types of grill surfaces.

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