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 Over 700 of the children were hospitalized, and one child died,
researchers said.
“This caught us by surprise,” said Dr. Gary Smith, the study’s lead
author from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide
Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
“I’ve seen these cases come through the hospital’s emergency
department,” he said. “I was aware of the case reports, but I
haven’t seen anyone pull together the numbers.”
Laundry detergent pods were introduced to the U.S. market in 2012.
The all-in-one packets contain detergent that’s released in the
wash, so users don't have to measure detergent in a cup.
Smith and his colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics that
doctors have previously reported on kids who've eaten or burst the
pods with serious consequences, such as being hospitalized and put
on a ventilator for several days.
To get a better understanding of how many children are being exposed
and possibly harmed by the pods, the researchers analyzed data from
2012 and 2013 from the National Poison Data System, which catalogs
calls made to U.S. poison control centers.
Overall, the centers received 17,230 calls about children younger
than six who were somehow exposed to the liquid in laundry detergent
pods. That’s roughly four calls per 10,000 children in that age
group, according to the researchers.
About a third of the calls involved children between the ages of one
and two years.
“This is an age group that has newfound mobility,” Smith said.
“They’re curious and they don’t sense danger.” Children may think
the colorful pods are candy or filled with juice, he said.
About 80 percent of all calls involved children swallowing the pods
or their liquids.
“The good news is that half of these exposures were trivial,” Smith
said, meaning the children did not get seriously sick or need
additional care. “If they swallow it and they swallow enough of it,
that’s when we get these serious symptoms,” he said.
The most common side effects of exposure to the pods or their
liquids include vomiting, coughing and choking, eye irritation or
pain and tiredness. Serious side effects included comas, seizures
and stomach burns.
While the researchers can’t say for sure that the detergents in the
pods are more powerful than traditional laundry detergent, the
symptoms after exposure to the pods seem more serious, Smith said.
“These are severe symptoms that we haven’t seen in the past with
traditional laundry detergent that we’re now seeing with these new
pods,” he said.
“The symptoms are a very broad spectrum,” Smith said. “It’s not only
the amount, but the route of exposure too.”
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Dr. Michael Gray of the Abrahamson Pediatric Eye Institute at
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio recently wrote
about 10 cases of laundry detergent pod exposures.
Speaking of the research by Smith's group, Gray said, “They saw well
over 100 corneal abrasions. . . . Certainly this is a nationwide
problem.”
“A corneal abrasion is basically a scratch on the cornea,” said
Gray, who wasn't involved in the new study. In the cases he wrote
about in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric
Ophthalmology and Strabismus, Gray believes the chemicals caused the
scratches.
Smith said parents need to recognize the toxicity of these laundry
detergent pods. They also need to close the packages and put them
away in a locked cabinet.
“We’re actually recommending if parents have young children in the
home, they should use traditional laundry detergent,” he said.
Gray said the pods need to be treated like any other chemical. “They
need to be kept out of reach and they need to be locked up,” he
said.
Smith said industry is moving in the right direction by crafting new
and more child-resistant packaging.
In 2012, for example, Tide said it would add a safety latch to its
detergent pods, after a child was hospitalized for swallowing the
contents. (See Reuters story of May 25, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/1sua9AJ.)
Smith doesn’t think any current packaging is truly child resistant,
however.
“These are continuing examples of a systemic problem we have in this
country,” he said. “It’s that our products are designed by adults
for the use and convenience of adults.”
SOURCES: http://bit.ly/uFc4g2 Pediatrics, online November 11, 2014,
and http://bit.ly/1uQ1I8J Journal of the American Association for
Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, October 2014.
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