A Penny’s Not Going to Kill You
Although people say that “a penny’s not going to kill you,” that’s not strictly true. Sometimes a penny will kill you.
There are several cases on record where ingesting a penny has killed a child,1 but, this report deals only with adult misadventures.
Four hundred sixty-one pennies can kill you. Investigators at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center claim credit for the discovery. In their words:
“This is the first reported case of human fatality associated with zinc intoxication following a massive ingestion of coins. Four hundred and sixtyone coins were removed from the gastrointestinal tract of a schizophrenic patient during the course of hospitalization. Many of the post-1981 pennies, which consist primarily of zinc, showed severe corrosion due to their prolonged contact with acidic gastric juice. The patient presented with clinical manifestations consistent with the local corrosive as well as systemic effects of zinc intoxication and died 40 days after admission with multi-system organ failure.”
(That’s an excerpt from the article “A Penny’s Not Going to Kill You,” by Ernest Ersatz, published in AIR 14:3.)