A 13-year-old Australian girl has reportedly died after participating in a recent social media trend ‘Chroming’.
According to reports, Esra Haynes, 13, died after inhaling fumes from a deodorant can, which caused her to go into cardiac arrest April 1, where she was then placed on life support.
Doctors had later determined that her brain was “damaged beyond repair” A week following her admission, with her family recently making the tough decision to turn off the machines which kept her breathing.
Following Ersa’s death, her family has been urging actions to prevent similar situations from occurring including lobbying for schools to teach CPR and for a safer and less toxic deodorant formula.
“We definitely have a mission to raise awareness for kids and anyone that does it,” her sister Imogen told reporters. “We don’t want that to happen to anyone else. We don’t want another family to go through this. It’s absolutely horrible.”
“We want to help other children not fall into the silly trap of doing this silly thing. It’s unquestionable that this will be our crusade,” Paul Haynes, Ersa’s father, said speaking to a local media outlet.
“No matter how much you lead a horse to water, anyone can drag them away. It’s not something she would have done on her own.”
“Chroming”, appears to be a resurfacing trend of a decades-old fad which includes the participants huffing or sniffing anything from aerosol cans to metallic paints, gas and solvents.
Chroming has a broader definition; however, the name has reportedly emerged from the act of sniffing chrome-based paint as a means to get high, according to the National Retail Association.
It’s understood that The Victoria Education Department in Australia said it would increase efforts to provide children with more information about chroming and its deadly effects in the wake of Esra Haynes’s death.