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Condom Snorting Challenge: Disturbing Teen Craze, Or Internet Myth?
Is the condom snorting challenge too ridiculous to be real?
Brace yourselves for the next teen trend.
Teens have reportedly taken to snorting condoms through their noses, and pulling them out from their mouths, according to USA Today. With News 4 San Antonio finding that teens have been indulging in dangerous behavior for likes, parents have been wringing their hands over this supposed social media trend. But is the condom snorting “challenge” actually a real thing?
Unlike rapping about “sausage” or doing the ice bucket challenge, snorting a condom could even kill you.
"You are literally putting something down your nose, which connects to your mouth, which connects to your trachea," physician Dr. Ammar Ali told CBS Detroit. "I mean, you are risking choking on it."
Other dangers include infection and the condom getting stuck inside, mid-route, Ali explained.
In extreme cases, accidentally inhaling or ingesting a condom during sex can have disastrous consequences, Bruce Y. Lee, an associate professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, explained in a piece for Forbes. During one notable instance, a woman had a condom travel down her trachea and into her lungs during oral sex. After the condom ended up blocking one of her airways, she contracted pneumonia and one of her lungs collapsed. In another horrifying example, Lee explained, a woman developed appendicitis after accidentally swallowing a condom only for a fragment of it to get lodged inside her appendix.
“Even if you manage to successfully pull the condom out through your mouth, inhaling a condom up your nose would be very uncomfortable and potentially quite painful. Would it really be worth all that just to get more likes and views?” Lee wrote.
As dangerous (and downright foolish) as condom-snorting for “fun” sounds, is it really something parents need to be concerned about? According to a recent fact-checking report from Snopes, headlines claiming that the condom-snorting challenge is the latest teen craze are “mostly false,” as most of the condom-snorting videos being referenced date all the way back to 2013, while some went as far back as 2007.
It sounds like teens actually aren’t snorting condoms up their noses — they’re taking bites out of Tide pods instead. Ah, Gen Z.
(Photo: Full frame shot of multi colored condoms. Via Getty Images)
