Story By:  Ana Marjanovic, Sub-Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency:  Newsflash

This is the moment doctors remove a huge seed stuck in a 77-year-old man’s throat after he sucked it down while snacking on fruit.

The patient – named only as Zhu by local media in the city of Quzhou, in eastern China’s Zhejiang province – had been tucking into an orange-coloured loquat fruit when he accidentally choked on a 1cm seed.

The seed ended up stuck in his windpipe for 10 days before he finally gave up hope that he could cough it out, and instead went to hospital.

But even there, conventional treatments failed to remove it.

So surgeons at the Quzhou People’s Hospital performed a delicate bronchoscopy op to dislodge the seed.

Video footage from the probe shows Dr Sheng Jianhui gently guiding the seed and popping it up from the airway before it is brought out through the patient’s mouth.

The loquat is an evergreen tree which is popular as an agricultural plant because of its orange-coloured fruit and also the leaves which are used to make a special kind of tea.

The orange fruits contain large brown seeds which are slightly poisonous and can release cyanide when ingested, although mostly the bitter flavour prevents them from being consumed.