Sunday, May 18, 2008

Hand sanitizer - keep away from kids

One of our kids used the hand sanitizer soon after she used the restroom, and with the typical kid's curiosity licked her hand to get a taste of it! And that was plenty of alcohol to get her disoriented for a few minutes. She quickly came by and explained she licked the hand sanitizer. Though she was talking and walking, I was wondering why she was staring a bit strangely. That got me worried, though she was still doing ok, and seemed to improve by the minute, after we gave her lots of water. Reading the labels on the hand sanitizer and a bit of immediate google search helped us determine hand sanitizers have 65% or more alcohol (apparently as good or more than vodka, and some types are toxic too), which was the reason for her to behave strangely for a couple of minutes. In fact, the label very clearly says, "If ingested, call the poison control center immediately". Luckily, everything was ok in a few minutes, but a lesson learned the hard way. Keep the hand sanitizers out of reach of children - there is no such thing as training them to use it properly!