GLP-1 weight loss drugs seem to work wonders for your waistline, even if there are concerns about rebounding when you get off of them. While we still don’t fully understand their long-term ramifications, we do know that in the short term, there are more consequences than simply gaining the weight back. Increasingly, GLP-1’s are showing up in poison control reports.
A new report from WTHR 13, Indianapolis’ NBC affiliate, details the hospitalization of a seven-year-old girl named Jessa Milender, who injected herself with her mother’s Mounjaro. Jessa began to vomit relentlessly. She couldn’t even keep water down. She screamed in pain, night and day, even in her sleep.
She was hospitalized twice in one week. Doctors worried about dehydration and potential kidney failure. At one point, her parents feared she might die. She ultimately recovered, but only after days of IV fluids and close monitoring.
How A 7-Year-Old Overdosed on GLP-1 Drugs
Cases like Jessa’s are still rare but are on the rise. The Indiana Poison Center reports calls doubled from 2024 to 2025, hitting 320 in a year. Nationally, America’s Poison Centers say reports involving injectable weight-loss drugs are up nearly 1,500% since 2019, totaling roughly 23,000 calls.
Most of the cases involve adults overdosing, often taking the medication too often or after mismeasuring doses, assuming that more means faster weight loss. Unfortunately, once injected, you can’t un-inject them. Signs of overdose include dehydration and pancreatitis, both of which can lead to hospitalization.
The problem here is not so much with the medication as with the stage it has reached. With millions of people taking them across the United States, there’s a lot more room for error. If you invented, say, a new type of vacuum cleaner that quickly caught on with millions of people across the country, that rise in popularity would coincide with a rise in people somehow finding a way to hurt themselves with this new snazzy vacuum cleaner.
In other words, GLP-1 overdoses are often, if not entirely, cases of user error. It’s an issue compounded by counterfeit GLP-1 medications.
The post A 7-Year-Old Overdosed on GLP-1 Drugs, and She Isn’t the First or Last Kid to Do It appeared first on VICE.
