For more than two months, a 10-year-old boy in Germany had colicky abdominal pain, constipation, vomiting, and weight loss, and several doctors attributed it to prolonged gastroenteritis. When physicians finally identified lead poisoning, the source still eluded them for weeks. His grandmother eventually found it: a damaged chain used to weigh down curtains, which the boy had been licking for months while playing video games.
The case was published Sept. 9 in Frontiers in Pediatrics by a team from RWTH Aachen University Hospital, RWTH Aachen University's Institute for Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine and the health department of Germany's Rhein-Erft-Kreis district.
