"My little daughter just started choking and I put my fingers down her throat to loop it out."
McDonald's has offered a full refund to the mother of a six-year-old girl who almost choked to death on a face mask cooked into her Chicken McNuggets.
UK mom Laura Arber said her daughter Maddie "could have died" after she had to pull the piece of disposable PPE from down her throat.
The mother-of-four said she bought a box of 20 chicken nuggets from McDonald's in Aldershot, Hampshire, on Tuesday.
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View Story"My little daughter just started choking and I put my fingers down her throat to loop it out there was just blue with the sick. I thought what on earth is this?!" she said, per HampshireLive.
"I didn't even think it could be the chicken nugget but looked over at the box and all you could see was this blue coming out of another chicken nugget in the box of 20."
"And the mask is cooked into it, like a part of the mixture and it's clearly a mask. You can see the seam and how solid it is in there."
A revolting video posted by the BBC shows one of the offending nuggets with a piece of the unmistakable blue mesh cooked right into the batter:
She posted about the ordeal to Facebook to warn other parents.
"What if I had walked out of the room and my daughter had choked?" she said. "She could have died. It's a split-second thing."
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View Story"I am just thinking, we have just come out of a pandemic and there is a face mask in my child's chicken nugget."
She said staff at McDonald's told her the McNuggets are not cooked on site.
Management then apologized — and offered her a full refund.
"We are very sorry to hear about this customer's experience. Food safety is of the utmost importance to us and we place great emphasis on quality control, following rigorous standards to avoid any imperfections," a spokesperson said, per the site.
"When the matter was brought to the attention of our staff, we apologized, offered a full refund and asked the customer to return the item so we could further investigate the matter and isolate the affected product."
Arber said she has always held the company in high esteem, as it provides funding for accommodation for families of sick children — where she herself stayed when her son was born into intensive care; however her experience this week has left her bitterly disappointed.
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