Last year, a 16-year-old girl in Delaware with severe pain in her abdomen was rushed to the emergency room after an X-ray showed a foreign object in her colon. After learning the girl had recently eaten food cooked on a grill, doctors were able to determine what was causing her discomfort: a wire bristle that had come loose from a grill brush used to get rid of food debris on the grill's cooking surface. She underwent surgery to remove the nearly half-inch-long bristle from the grill brush. An estimated 1,700 Americans went to an emergency room between 2002 and 2014 after having ingested wire bristles hidden in grilled food, according to a recent study published in the medical journal Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. One in four of those with grill brush injuries had to be admitted to the hospital. C.W. David Chang, M.D., a senior author on the grill brush study, believes his study might underestimate the true number of such accidents. That’s because the study findings are based only on ER visits.

It “does not account for cases presenting at urgent care facilities or other outpatient settings,” says Chang, an associate professor of otolaryngology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. According to the study, wire bristle injuries from grill brushes have been reported most often to the mouth and throat, but can rarely—as in the case of the Delaware teenager—affect the stomach and intestines when people mistakenly consume a bristle that’s hidden in food. Do you use a grill brush? Tell us which kind in the comments below. Protect Yourself From Grill Brush Injuries Consider safer cleaning tools. After every use, depending what type of grill you have (check the owner’s manual), instead of a traditional stainless steel or brass wire grill brush, you can clean grill grates that are warm but not hot with a pumice stone or a scouring-pad-shaped wire-mesh grill cleaning tool. For another alternative to grill brushes, you can also brush loose food particles off a warm grate with a wad of crumpled-up aluminum foil.

If you use a stainless steel or brass wire grill brush, take extra precautions. air cleaner for harley touringInspect the brush and the bristles before cooking and make sure your grill brush’s bristles are tightly anchored to the brush. engine cleaning gun air compressorIf it appears that some areas of the grill brush have fewer bristles than others or the brush is worn or warped, replace the brush. kitchen air cleaner singaporeAnd if you use an electric grill brush, such as the Grillbot, it’s suggested that the brushes should be replaced every grilling season or after 100 uses. Get the right stuff for deep cleaning. When grill grates need an occasional big cleaning, “Treatment with liquid grill cleaners (in spray and foam form) can help loosen debris,” Chang says.

You might need to pair a liquid cleaner with abrasive pads, which have a coarse texture similar to pumice stones, to get rid of really stubborn food residue. You can also use a wet fine-steel-wool pad for a more thorough cleaning.Cleaning up the grill for summer barbecue season could have serious hidden health dangers.This week, a woman in Connecticut needed emergency surgery to remove a wire barbecue brush bristle from her digestive tract -- and doctors say she's not the first. Cheryl Harrison of Wallingford, Connecticut, was rushed to the hospital by her husband after feeling a sharp and unusual pain in her stomach.That pain was caused by a single stray bristle that had fallen off the metal grill cleaning brush and found its way into the hamburger she ate. She came into the emergency room within a day because of severe abdominal pain. After a CT scan showed the wire, doctors were able to remove it from her stomach through laparoscopic surgery.Dr. Aziz Benbrahim, her general surgeon at MidState Medical Center, told CBS News she was lucky because she came in right away.

A previous patient of his who had a grill brush wire stuck in his system waited for a couple of weeks. It had punctured his intestine."I had to open him up completely, " said Benbrahim. "Then we remove this wire and we found out also why he had chest pain -- because he also had pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot in his lungs." "He was just lucky he was still alive," he added. "All from this wire." Summer health and safety: 5 mistakes you don't want to make Just one of the coarse wire bristles can puncture any part of the digestive system -- esophagus, intestines or stomach -- as it makes its way down the tract. The consequences can range from sharp pains to major punctures that could cause death.The CDC says approximately 80,000 people come to emergency rooms every year after accidentally swallowing foreign objects -- the majority are children. Wire bristles from grill cleaning brushes are part of that group, but one of the hardest to detect because the bristles are so thin they don't always show up on X-rays.

No data is officially collected on these cases."Nobody knows the statistics, that's the problem. The only paper published talks about 6 or 7 cases and I believe it's a much, much more common," Benbrahim said. "When I was talking to my colleagues at the hospital, I was surprised that all of them had at least one or two patients like this. I didn't think it was that common. And this isn't a very big hospital, so I assume that in a bigger hospital they would have more."The one definitive study was conducted at the Rhode Island Hospital in Providence in 2010, after the hospital surgically removed wire bristles from six patients within an 18-month period; it was updated in 2012. In these six cases, the hospital only determined that wires were causing the painful swallowing or abdominal pain through careful questions about what and when the patients ate and either x-rays or CT scans. The bristles had perforated the small intestines of two patients and the stomach and liver of another. For people who have unidentified abdominal pain, seeking medical attention quickly to find the source of the problem -- and telling doctors all the specifics of eating habits since the pain began -- can make a big difference in faster diagnosis and treatment."