Hand sanitizer: health officials warn of growing teen poisonings, drinking
Dr. Cyrus Rangan of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is seen addressing the media about hand sanitizer in this still image taken from a KTLA broadcast.
The devil will find work for idle hands: drinking hand sanitizer these days, it seems.
According to The Los Angeles Times, health officials in California have since 2010 tracked reports teenagers drinking the substance and are now sounding the alarm.
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The newspaper says the California Poison Control System reports 60 instances of teenagers drinking the substance, which has an ethyl alcohol content of 62 percent, and in Los Angeles alone there were 16 such cases last month.
Out of a total of over 2,000 cases of various ages since 2010, most were treated at home and the vast majority involved infants under 5 who were thought to have accidentally ingested the substance, The Times said.
Dr. Calvin Lowe was quoted as telling NBC Los Angeles that the practice was “very, very dangerous.”
Citing the American Association of Poison Control Centers,
NBC provided the following list of the substances most frequently poisoning teenagers in 2010. The numbers are ranked by calls to a poison control center:
Ibuprofen — 10,030 calls
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor antidepressants — 8,419 calls
Acetaminophen — 7,995 calls
Atypical Antipsychotics — 7,319 calls
Benzodiazepines — 7,192
Alcohol — 5,061 calls
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According to ABC News, instructions freely available on the Internet show how to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer by using salt.
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