How Your Grill Could Make You Sick

NPR

There’s nothing like the scent of charred meat wafting over your neighbor’s fence to get you in the mood for summer.

But alas, grilling is not without its dangers. If E. coli and carcinogens in burnt meat weren’t enough to keep you on your toes, now there’s a new contender: the wire grill brush.

Though they haven’t been studied much, doctors at one hospital in Rhode Island started noticing enough patients coming in after accidentally ingesting the wire bristles from the brushes that they wrote them up in a small study.

Between May 2009 and November 2010, Rhode Island Hospital admitted six patients to its emergency room after they accidentally consumed the tiny wires from the brushes used to clean their grills.

The patients initially complained of pain while swallowing or abdominal pain and had all recently eaten grilled meat. Upon inspection of x-rays and CT scans, doctors discovered the wires in the throats or abdomens of the patients, and concluded they were the bristles of grill brushes that had broken off and become embedded in the meat.

Doctors removed the wires from the necks of three patients, while two required surgery to remove them from their small intestines and another required surgery to remove them from their liver. The results were published online this week in the American Journal of Roentgenology.