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I’m sure a lot of you have seen the e-mail forward going around about the young girl who ended up in the emergency room after licking hand sanitizer. Here’s an excerpt:
"These days they have all kinds of different scents and when you have a curious child, they are going to put all kinds of things in their mouths. When we arrived at Saint Francis, we told the ER doctor there to check her blood alcohol level, which, yes we did get weird looks from it but they did it. The results were her blood alcohol level was 85% and this was 6 hours after we first took her. There's no telling what it would have been if we would have tested it at the first ER."
Yikes. I immediately suspected the e-mail of being an urban legend, but actually, it’s true.
CNN reports:
"Ingesting about 200 millilitres of isopropanol can be deadly because it depresses the central nervous system and the heart, Emadi and Coberly wrote in a second letter.
'Physicians should be aware of the potential for isopropanol intoxication, especially among alcoholics, in the hospital setting. Perhaps changing the description on the container from isopropyl alcohol to isopropanol or propane-2-ol would decrease the attraction of these hand sanitizers for potentially dangerous abuse,' they concluded."
It makes sense. I knew there was alcohol (the kind you shouldn’t drink) in hand sanitizer, but I didn’t realize how little of it you’d have to ingest to really mess you up. When I talked to my co-workers about this, most of them laughed. “Who would lick hand sanitizer?” they said.
Kids, that’s who. Especially little kids. I’ve been giving the little angel hand sanitizer since she was old enough to touch the sheep at the petting zoo, and though I’m always watching her when she uses it, she’s getting to that age where she wants to do things herself and knows where things are kept. After reading this story, we had a serious talk about how she should never, ever put it in her mouth because it would make her tummy very, very, VERY sick. I think she gets it, but it still makes me nervous.
How much can make a small child sick? Apparently, not very much. Merri Williams writes:
"Due to the alcohol content of the hand sanitizers and the relative small sizes of the children, it only takes a very small amount to produce all the side effects of an adult drinking too much booze. In fact, Heidi Kuhl, a health educator at the Central New York Poison Control Center, is quoted as saying, 'Ingesting as little as an ounce or two of this product could be fatal to a toddler.'"
Another issue here is teenagers. If teenagers are dumb enough to huff off whipped cream containers or make balloons with nitrous oxide, they are sure dumb enough to drink hand sanitizer. RebelWIL thought the same thing and looked into it.
"Another problem here is that some hand sanitizers also have other agents in them which can be even more deadly and some children simply don't read the labels of what they are putting in their bodies. Some hand sanitizers use isopropyl (rubbing alcohol) which is poisonous while some use ethanol (moon shine) as there germ killing agents.
I also looked up some reports which claim some alcoholics are actually drinking hand sanitizers to get drunk since a bottle of hand sanitizer costs around a dollar where their booze costs much more which is also why children can easily obtain hand sanitizers and afford it."
What to do? It’s a hard one. Some kids are mature enough to safely handle hand sanitizer on their own, and some aren’t. After learning this information, I’m going to assume my three-year-old doesn’t fall into the “ready to handle it” category, and I’ve put all the hand sanitizers up high with the other toxic stuff. She has to ask me for it so I can watch her put it on. When she’s older, I’ll have to include hand sanitizers in the list of “stuff I’ll kill you if I find out you’re using” speech I thought would apply mostly to alcohol and drugs.
Hand sanitizers aren’t evil. I still think it’s a good idea and a good product – but perhaps not as innocent a product as we thought it was.
