A customer grabs the last bottle of Purell hand sanitizer on April 28, 2009, at a West Aid Pharmacy in Los Angeles.(Photo: Damian Dovarganes, AP)
(NEWSER)<span style="color: Red;">*</span>– Think you're good at locking up common household poisons from young kids? You may be forgetting one that looks surprisingly appealing to a small child: hand sanitizer. The number of cases of kids younger than 12 reported to poison control centers for ingesting hand sanitizer, which now comes in "fun" scents<span style="color: Red;">*</span>such as grape and strawberry, nearly quadrupled across the U.S. in just a few years, according to an analysis by the Georgia Poison Center. Cases jumped<span style="color: Red;">*</span>from 3,266 cases in 2010 to 16,117 in 2014, reports<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
CNN. While beer and wine tend to contain about 5% and 12% alcohol respectively, hand sanitizer can range from 45% to 95%, a concentration so high that just a few squirts can actually cause alcohol poisoning.
"A kid is not thinking this is bad for them," the poison center's director, Dr. Gaylord Lopez, tells CNN. "A lot of the more attractive (hand sanitizers) are the ones that are scented.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>There are strawberry-, grape-, orange-flavored hand sanitizers that are very appealing to kids." When Nhaijah Russell, who is 6, recently swallowed three or four squirts of strawberry-scented<span style="color: Red;">*</span>hand sanitizer at her school, she began to slur her words and by the time she reached the emergency room she could hardly walk. Nhaijah's blood-alcohol level was .179, twice the legal limit for an adult. "That was very scary," her mother said. "It could have been very lethal for my child." Some kids reportedly ingest hand sanitizer on purpose, to get drunk or as a dare, and<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
News Quench<span style="color: Red;">*</span>adds that schools that don't switch to non-alcohol based sanitizers should at least store them out of reach.
This article originally appeared on Newser:
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