‘I’m on fire, mummy’
Aroha Clarke was in shock when she saw smoke rising from her eight-year-old daughter’s legs.
‘‘She was screaming ‘I’m burning. I’m on fire mum’,’’ said Clarke.
‘‘A few seconds that’s when we saw smoke coming off her.’’
Clarke says her daughter Azaleah had been playing make-up on the afternoon of Friday, November 2, after shopping with her uncle and purchasing plastic nails and glue from a novelty store in Waiuku, near Auckland.
Her daughter had sat down that evening to watch a movie with the nail glue in hand.
‘‘She dropped and spilt it on her pants
. . . seconds later she started screaming and crying in pain.’’
As Azaleah ran to her parents, there appeared to be a white smoke billowing off the front of her black cotton tights, Clarke said.
‘‘We were in shock, we didn’t know what to do, so her dad kind of just ripped the pants off her.’’
Clarke said removing the pants tore a large amount of skin off.
‘‘We think that did quite a bit of damage, but how were we to know? It happened all so fast.’’
The nail glue contained cyanoacrylates, a common adhesive.
Professor Allan Blackman, head of the Department of Chemistry, at Auckland University of Technology, said it was possible sugar molecules in the cotton of the tights caused a rapid reaction with the glue.
‘‘That creates a tremendous amount of heat and also forms acetic acid as a byproduct, so that can also potentially burn the skin.
‘‘And when you rip it off, as a glue it’s going to take the skin with it. So those three bad things together . . . it doesn’t bear thinking about.’’
Azaleah was taken to Middlemore Hospital by ambulance. Clarke was told by medical staff her daughter had suffered second-degree chemical burns and may need future skin grafts. ‘‘I just want everyone to know the damage this stuff can do,’’ she said.
Clarke contacted the store that supplied the glue who promptly took the product off the shelves.
‘‘We didn’t know this glue [does] this, we are very, very sorry,’’ the store’s owner, Wei Zhang, said.
Evon Hen, a spokeswoman from the store’s supplier CIL Imports, said the company regretted hearing that a child had been injured because of nail glue and it hoped Azaleah recovered soon.
However, Hen said the glue was a product common among other stores in New Zealand and it was up to the customer to read the warning labels on the packaging.
But Clarke said the small writing at the back of the packaging was not enough of a warning. ‘‘That’s just stupid. If it can do that much damage, it should have been all over the packaging really. In big black bold writing.’’
Azaleah is now at home, after being discharged the following Saturday afternoon. Clarke said her daughter was still ‘‘very sore’’ and has told her mother the pain is a nine on a scale of one to 10.
Matt Dean, EPA compliance manager for hazardous substances, said the labelling on the glue package did not comply with the Hazardous Substances (Identification) Regulations 2001.