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According to a new study, many American children continue to be poisoned by laundry, suggesting voluntary safety standards, many of which are not doing enough to prevent children from eating them.
Poison centers received nearly 73,000 calls for help with single-use liquid laundry detergent sachets, or pods, from 2012 to 2017, for the first six years of product marketing. Almost all of these cases involved children under six years old. In many cases, children easily unpacked brightly colored packaging that they confused with candy.
The annual rate of calls from laundry pods to poison control for children under six has more than doubled from 2012 to 2015, before the voluntary safety standards of the American Society for Testing and Testing. Materials require clearer and opaque packaging that is more difficult to unpack.
Then, between 2015 and 2017, the annual call rate dropped by 18% in children under six, even as it increased in older children and adults.
"The current voluntary standard, public awareness campaigns and product and packaging changes to date are good first steps, but their numbers are still too high," said Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of Study, director of the Injury Research Center and injury prevention policies. at the Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
"We can do better," Smith said by e-mail.
It is possible that the safety standards were below expectations because they allowed manufacturers to meet the requirements of child-proof packaging in different ways instead of complying with a single strict standard, note the pediatric researchers.
Older standards established by the Poison Prevention Packaging Act of 1970 have resulted in a rapid 40-55% reduction in poisonings caused by products such as aspirin and household chemicals in the past two or three years. first years, according to the study. Unlike these products, which people can store for years, laundry pods should be used more quickly, allowing any change to make packaging safer, for faster and more dramatic impact. note the researchers.
The chemicals in the lugs can cause seizures, coma, severe breathing problems, eye damage and burns.
Eight people died in the study after eating clothespins.
Two of these deaths involved curious babies. The other six deaths involved adults aged 43 and over with dementia, Alzheimer's disease or developmental disability.
"Like other poisons, young children can become much sicker than other older people with a given dose of liquid laundry detergent because their body weight is lower," Smith said. "Fortunately, traditional liquid or powdered laundry detergents are much less toxic than laundry detergents and are therefore a safer alternative."
In total, 239 people in the study survived the "major effects" of life-threatening exposure to the laundry basket or resulting in significant disfigurement or disability; most of these cases involved children under six years of age.
However, most of the cases in the study had only "mild" symptoms, or none at all.
The study was not a controlled experiment designed to prove what factors could cause children to eat directly from laundry pods or to suffer adverse health effects.
Dr. Richard Dart, director of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center and the Denver Health and Hospital Authority, also explains that the researchers did not take into account the sales of the laundry pods or the availability of the products.
Nevertheless, laundry pods can be more dangerous because the detergent is more concentrated than in bottles or cartons of soap, said Dart, not involved in the study, by email.
This means that parents should take immediate action if they suspect that a child has been exposed.
First, parents should call a poison control center (1-800-222-1222), which is free.
"In these cases, first aid is usually to irrigate the eyes or to drink tap water from the tap to dilute and rinse the detergent out of the throat," said Dart. "If ocular or throat symptoms persist, the child should be brought to emergency and, if he has any breathing problems, call 911."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/31aMm1G Pediatrics, online June 3, 2019.
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