Profiling cases of button battery ingestion using Canadian and British Columbia poison centre data

Ingestion of button batteries poses an acute life-threatening injury risk, particularly for small children. The Canadian Surveillance System for Poison Information reported 1021 single-substance button-battery ingestion cases from 2020 to 2023, and the British Columbia Drug and Poison Information Centre (DPIC) managed 548 unintentional ingestion cases from 2013 to 2023. Nearly all the DPIC cases required hospital admission for X-ray imaging, and seven patients required surgical removal of the battery from the esophagus. Our findings support developing product warning labels and enforcing child-resistant battery packaging and compartments on consumer products.