Decline of cash credited for drop in surgery for children swallowing objects | Hacker News Reader

Decline of cash credited for drop in surgery for children swallowing objects

theguardian.com

86 pointsgeox61 comments

https://archive.is/2025.03.28-005050/https://www.theguardian...

Getting rid of 1¢/2¢/5¢ coins would be a help, simply so there are fewer coins floating around - less change given on an average transaction.

My kids love playing with coins and before they turn 4 or so, love sticking them in their mouth. You have to be careful not to leave them around. We got a gumball machine that dispenses M&Ms, so at least now they think of coins as “something I should spend” instead of “something I should chew on”.

Coins aren’t that toxic… most of the time. An even worse threat is button and coin cell batteries. Those should really leave any parent worried. When disposing of them, they need to be wrapped up in something big enough they can’t be swallowed and then taped up so the coin can’t get out. Lately I’ve been disposing of them in a sharps container I have for getting rid of Stanley knife razor blades, another decent choice.

Not just kids but also dogs.

Wait, do Americans (judging from your 1cent coins) not have battery recycling? All my coin cells just go in the battery recycling.

I'd say in this case it's worse if you have recycling because then you have to keep them around until you get them to recycling vs. just chucking them in the bin.

But they can stay in the "dangerous objects that children don't have access to" place, until you take them to the battery recycling.

So what you need is... a recycling bin where you put stuff that are awaiting your next trip to the recycling station.

Batteries, light-bulbs, small electronics...

Sounds expensive to support all the logistics of that bin.

For me it’s just a shoebox by the door that comes with me the next time I go to a thrift store or other participating e-waste handler.

Yeah, I have a little battery jar as well. I basically only use coin batteries, so it looks kinda cool as it fills up.

How many batteries do you go through ? I'm speaking from experience - my inlaws put batteries in a box in a drawer, my snoopy older son found it going through the drawers and spread them all over the flor. He's old enough not to eat them but the younger one isn't. Nothing happened ofc. but point is you are collecting dangerous shit for no reason - the ~10 batteries I replace in a year ? Not to mention you never remember to take them to a recycling place, maybe in like 3 years if you haven't grown tired of them and just chucked them in regular garbage.

In my American city, yes, we can put batteries in a zip-lock bag on top of our trash bin. But I'm not going to do this for a single coin cell.

I usually just have a stack/pile/box of electronics and batteries to take to the local electronics recycling place a few miles away. Unfortunately, the pile is never 0, because as soon as I drop it off, I find something new to get rid of.

That may be exclusively a Portland thing.

You definitely can't do that in most of the US.

I'm in California.

I've never tried it but I can almost guarantee any bag placed on top of my trash bin would end up falling off and laying the the nearby grass when the truck tries to tip the bin. For most of the year my truck comes by before dawn. Even if they saw it, I'm sure they wouldn't get out of the truck to properly handle it.

A dedicated bin in front of my house for it? No.

I’m not really going to make a special trip to some place to recycle tiny little batteries - and most recycling is a scam anyway that either gets dumped in the regular rubbish or else gets shipped to a third world country.

For things that can be legitimately recycled I make sure to reuse them… cardboard is one thing that is legitimately recycled here with special places to drop it off that is worth the special trip.

For plastic trash, it isn’t recyclable and is one of the most irritating aspects of buying anything new: a mountain of unusable plastic. The same goes for takeout food.

At least where I am in the US, the Goodwill also participates in the state’s E Waste program, so I just have a little box of used batteries that comes with me when I spring clean and inevitably decide to donate something.

The Goodwills in my area all claim to do e-waste. I've never been to one that will accept e-waste.

Just bury it at the bottom of a box of clothes then.

In Finland any shop that sells small batteries must also offer to recycle them for free.

There is similar rule for bottles/cans with deposits (similar to CRV though values are quite a bit higher, 0.10-0.40€ depending on size/material). If you sell something for which customer needs to pay the deposit for you also need to accept them & pay back the deposit.

> most recycling is a scam anyway that either gets dumped in the regular rubbish or else gets shipped to a third world country

I've never seen this credibly claimed about battery recycling. Curbside plastic recycling sure, but my understanding is that at least lithium ion batteries legitimately have enough value to be worth the effort to really recycle for the companies who do it.

In my country every supermarket has a recycling box where you can drop batteries, light bulbs and old small electronics (think hair dryers or keyboards).

I believe this comes from an EU regulation that when electronics reach end-of-life you can give them back to the store that sold them.

I'd love to see the financials of this service, as I assume sometimes people dump things that are working they just don't need. I guess the store also pays the company something so they don't need to deal with recycling themselves. And I guess they just put everything in a shipping container and send it to China.

> A dedicated bin in front of my house for it? No.

I think all supermarkets here have them these days; anyone who sells batteries is required to provide battery recycling facilities, as far as I know.

Also, bizarrely, my _office_ has them, despite not using anything that I can think of that uses disposable batteries at all.

If you’re using a (presumably plastic?) sharps container, you should be very careful that they’re wrapped in something first; otherwise they are a potential fire hazard.

> For plastic trash, it isn’t recyclable

Most plastic is recyclable these days. Now, whether it gets recycled or not is another question, and will depend on local law and facilities, but it’s mostly recyclable.

A lot of places in the US just don't have recycling at all. I've never heard of a municipal recycling program that takes batteries. Everywhere in the US I'm aware of you have to take batteries to a specialty drop-off location for recycling. They're all private businesses like Home Depot or small battery shops.

Because of this, a horrifying number of batteries just go into the landfill

My county is about 35,000 people. There's no pickup for batteries, but they accept them for dropoff on site (along with other recyclables).

I think this is pretty common, probably any landfill with a household hazardous waste program.

My county in California has a household hazardous waster disposal drop off. Any resident can drop off old batteries, bulbs, motor oil, anti-freeze, brake fluid, paints thinner, solvents, pesticides, cleaning chemicals, electronic waste, old stuff with mercury and medical sharps to name a few. You don't even have to exit your car. Just place everything in boxes in your car trunk and park at the facility and their staff will take care of it. If you have anything that looks new and usable they leave it in a reuse area for others who want it. Its all funded through a $15 fee on our property taxes. Well worth it for the convenience.

Typically it's a one day per year household hazardous waste drop off. Bigger cities may have more frequency.

Any other day and it's usually a volunteer business somewhere in the town. It may have a fee.

Oh that's not practical at all.

We have battery drop off points every neighbourhood supermarket, which is in every couple of kilometers or so (Europe).

In Copenhagen (Denmark) we have them in every apartment building. There's a bin for batteries, and a cupboard for other hazardous waste.

I'm not sure if every house has one, or if they're just in a few places along streets with houses, but there is some system for it as I've seen the red boxes.

It’s an unnecessarily confusing headline.

“Decline of cash credited” makes me think of “cash credited” in accounting.

The actual headline is “Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects” … which doesn’t provide the context necessary to correct this misunderstanding until after you figure you what “NHS surgery” is.

It’s a really bad sentence.

Yes I wish people are more cognisant of potentially confusing and misleading writing and proactively write clearer language.

I thought govt reduced spending on children surgeries, utterly confusing.

An obvious manipulation tactic on the path to abolish cash. "Think of the children!"

A better alternative, remove small coins. They serve no purpose nowadays, inflation made them obsolete. They are even more expensive to make then their inherent worth.

The only purpose left for using small coins is for psychological manipulation, by pricing items at 0,99 instead of 1,00. This has been proven a successful tactic for supermarkets and vendors, to the detriment of buyers, who are manipulated into thinking something is "cheaper", because the price is reduced by 1% or less.

A few European countries, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy already use the practice of rounding to 5 with no issues whatsoever, thereby basically removing smaller coins.

"An obvious manipulation tactic on the path to abolish cash."

This was the first thing I thought.

I’d like to see a similar analysis on rechargeable devices vis a vis batteries instead of coins.

We don’t even need the choking hazard of coins to justify getting rid of them.

There is essentially nothing you can buy that is individually less than a quarter in value, and probably still not a whole lot that is less than a dollar.

Maybe some disposable shopping bags? Some screws at the hardware store?

I think the US could eliminate coins and start printing 25 cent or maybe 50 cent bills, or perhaps not even do that at all. Transactions under a dollar could be rounded up or be made electronically (eliminate the minimum flat fee part of card transactions first, though).

Why they have to make guesses at this and not actually know the reason? Based on my experience with ER visits there's a form specifically for things removed from a child's nose: 1. raisin, 2. battery, 3. coin, 4. army man, 5. intelligence-enhancing crayon(s) 6. other

Upvoted for the optional plurality of "intelligence-enhancing crayon(s)"

My thought exactly, I found it utterly incredulously that we some how have theses statistics with out any sort of object classification.

The red ones give the most intelligence

Let us not forget green peas, so we don’t have to eat them.

Huh. Why raisins, but not other raisin-sized foods (e.g. sunflower seeds, Tic Tacs, etc)?

Kids often snack on little raisin boxes and their squishy nature make them easy to stuff.

My brother got a popcorn kernel stuck in his ear that required a doctor visit to remove. Kids are dumb

We were on our way to the ER when my kid was able to sneeze out a Cheerio he'd shoved up his nose while we were out running errands. He's now about to start grad school, so they can learn.

Because, as they say in the paper, the data only say a foreign body was removed - not what sort it was.

However, a different study showed that 75% of incidents in kids under 6 was due to coins.

Given that the change appears to coincide with the UK's move to cashless, it is a reasonable assumption. Although they do note the limits of their conclusion.

https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1308/rcsann.2024...

I once asked my ER doctor relative what is the most avoidable thing adults come into the ER for, and he said choking on something they're eating alone at home.

Nice thing to remember next time you're gagging on some stringy cheese because you thought it better to scarf than chew your pizza.

Only living people make it to the ER to be treated. Survivorship bias. ;-)

I don't understand. If you're choking at home, alone, you suffocate and die.

If you recover, you're no longer choking. Why would you go to the ER then?

Yeah, I probably accidentally added that bit myself.

Terrible headline.

Very obvious objective being served by this "think of the children" propaganda piece

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Flatly absurd. These are the kinds of connections only a schizophrenic mind could make.

"For example, surgeons performed 484 (31%) fewer procedures to remove something from a child’s nose in 2022 compared with 2012."

So your sample size is so absurdly small that your conclusions could not possibly have any meaning. What a waste of time this article was.

EDIT: The population of the UK is 68 million people and this is an entirely retrospective assessment. There's probably a reason they just didn't link to the RCSE page itself as it's speculation is far more reserved:

https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-...

That reads far less like a paper trying to "nudge" people in a preferred direction.

I wish it had better data to back it up, but it's reasonable to think that coins are a popular thing for kids to play with.

Is sample size even relevant here? If they’re working with NHS data, presumably they have pretty reliable population data (i.e. not randomly sampled) to work with.

And regardless, even if it was a sample, I don’t see how a sample of thousands would be too small to detect a very large effect like that, unless the variance was extremely high. (But again, I’m not sure that complaining about “sample size” even makes sense in this case.)

> Is sample size even relevant here?

There are two sample sizes. Kids who put things in noses. People who use cash. One is vastly larger than the other. Drawing conclusions from one about the other _purely retrospectively_ is nonsense.

I agree that an observational study cannot prove that the reduction in these cases is due to the rise of cashless payments. The researchers themselves say it is “multifactorial.” However, that has absolutely nothing to do with “sample size.” There is no sampling here.

The relative size of the population of people using cash vs. the population of kids sticking things up their nose also has nothing to do with whether is study is valid.

The study is essentially making an observation and then presenting a hypothesis: in 2012, the use of cash began to decline in the UK, and over the next 10 years, there was a significant decline in the number of cases reported to the NHS where kids had to have a foreign object removed. Given that 75% of cases historically involved coins, the authors make a totally reasonable inference that the decline in the use of cash in the UK over this exact period likely played a big role. They also name several other factors that may have contributed.

Your strong reaction to this study seems disproportionate and misguided. It’s not the most powerful or compelling study, but there’s nothing blatant wrong with it.

> So your sample size is so absurdly small that your conclusions could not possibly have any meaning.

What do you mean by sample size? These are total numbers for the whole year. There is no sampling going on.

> The population of the UK is 68 million people

Ok? So what?

> and this is an entirely retrospective assessment.

Again, what does this mean? How else would you notice these trends? Proactively?

> There's probably a reason they just didn't link to the RCSE page itself as it's speculation is far more reserved

I read both, and they seem to say the same. Where do you see the difference?

Well can we really make inferences from the population of the UK to that of bigger countries? Maybe only people on tiny island nations have this problem.

The UK has the 21st-highest population of all countries. It's hardly 'tiny'.

More than a thousand hits is a very good sample size. The total population of the UK barely matters in this check for statistical significance.

A very general rule of thumb is that you want 10-100 samples in each category. In this case it's about a thousand children in one category and millions in the other category. That's more than enough to measure a 30% difference.

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