Ural Mother Gets Lung Abscess After Nasal Aspirator
A young mother from Pervouralsk (Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia), Oksana Stakheeva, was hospitalized with a lung abscess after using a nasal aspirator to remove mucus from her child. Doctors warn about the dangers of such devices.
Jul 30, 2026 0
The lung abscess in the patient reached a size of six centimeters.
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Oksana Stakheeva, a resident of Pervouralsk (Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia), ended up in the hospital with a diagnosis of a right lung abscess. According to her, the infection entered her lungs when she used a nasal aspirator to clean her child’s nose. Treatment was limited to a course of antibiotics, although in similar cases patients often require surgery.
Oksana recounted her experience with the lung abscess on her blog.
«This is the story of how I ended up in the hospital after suctioning my child’s snot. On July 7, I was hospitalized with a diagnosis of a right lung abscess. What is an abscess? An abscess is a limited purulent-necrotic cavity in the lung tissue. That is, pus accumulated in my lung. I had a billion questions: how, why, where from? I didn’t hit myself, I didn’t catch a cold, I didn’t have any long-term illnesses. I was admitted to the hospital, they gave me IV drips with various antibiotics for 10 days. My cavity grew to six centimeters, and I was sure they would remove it surgically. But fortunately, there was no surgery, and the pus resolved thanks to antibiotics, and I am now continuing the course of treatment,» Oksana said in her blog.
The woman noted that doctors strongly advise against using the aspirator. «When the doctor and I began to discuss how I could have contracted a lung abscess, I remembered that literally two weeks before I was hospitalized, I was cleaning my child’s nose with a regular nasal aspirator. Not an electric one, not a syringe, but the most ordinary one. When I told the doctor about it, I heard that such a way of removing mucus always carries very dangerous consequences. Because the child may be sick with something, but for him it is not as dangerous as for the parent who inhaled it. The doctor gave me an example of a patient, a father, who also cleaned his child’s nose, and he was brought back from the brink of death because he had contracted a very rare infection. And a lung abscess occurs when an infection enters most often through aspiration,» the blogger explained.
Oksana warned other parents against using such devices, emphasizing that even an ordinary nasal aspirator can be dangerous.
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