The small, colorful packets of detergent were responsible for more
than a quarter of cases of 3- and 4-year-olds admitted to emergency
rooms with chemical eye burns in 2015, researchers found.
“Chemical eye burns are potentially very serious injuries and these
laundry detergent pods are a very concentrated form of an extremely
hazardous chemical,” said Dr. Sterling Haring, a physician and
researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in
Baltimore.
“They may not look as dangerous as a bottle of bleach, but we need
to treat them like we would any other dangerous chemical, and that
means keeping it up and away and out of sight,” Haring told Reuters
Health by email.
Consumer’s Union, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, says the pods
can be mistaken for candy by very young children and it has
petitioned regulators and manufacturers to change the product in
ways that make it less appealing to kids and the containers more
child-proof.
The study team also writes in JAMA Ophthalmology that it would help
if the pods were redesigned to make them less attractive and more
durable.
To see how laundry pod-related eye injuries have changed over time,
the researchers analyzed data from the National Electronic Injury
Surveillance System, which provides national estimates of
product-related injuries.
In particular, the team searched for emergency room admissions for
eye injuries resulting from chemical burns among 3- and 4 year-old
children and determined from descriptions which of these injuries
were caused by laundry detergent pods.
Between 2010 and 2015, there were 1,201 eye burns from laundry
detergent pods among kids in this age group treated in emergency
rooms. The number of incidents rose dramatically each year from 12
injuries in 2012 to 480 in 2015, representing a 32-fold increase.
In 2012, laundry pod-related burns made up 0.8 percent of all
chemical eye burns in young kids, while in 2015, laundry pods caused
26 percent of all chemical eye burns in this age group.
Most of the eye injuries occurred at home and resulted from children
breaking the pod itself, and either having detergent squirt directly
into one or both eyes, or getting it on their hands and then
touching their eyes.
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The primary problem with laundry pods is not with negligent
parenting, but with a product design that does not consider
children’s safety, said Dr. Gary Smith, president of the Child
Injury Prevention Alliance in Columbus, Ohio.
“Packets often resemble candy or juice, and are the perfect size for
a young child to grab and put in their mouth,” Smith, who was not
involved in the study, said by email.
“We recommend that households where children younger than 6 years of
age live or visit use traditional (liquid or powder) laundry
detergent,” Smith said.
If laundry detergent does get in a child’s eye, the first thing to
do is put the eye under a faucet and run cool water on it for 20
minutes, said Haring, urging parents to do this before calling 911
or going to the hospital.
“The sooner you can get the eye flushed and the longer you can flush
it, the better the odds are of protecting your child’s vision,”
Haring said.
SOURCE: bit.ly/2k4eA7y JAMA Ophthalmology, online February 2, 2017.
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