Sawyer said hand sanitizers are as much as 95 percent alcohol, so it doesn’t take much to show symptoms, including vomiting, passing out or becoming unresponsive. Compare that to wine or beer at 12 percent and 5 percent and that’s a serious problem. Swallowing 2-3 squirts of hand sanitizers could be equal to alcohol poisoning sometimes and could be quite deadly.
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“Kids are getting into these products more frequently, and unfortunately, there’s a percentage of them going to the emergency room”, said Dr. Gaylord Lopez, director of the Georgia Poison Center.
The little girl was taken to the emergency room when she was unable to walk and was slurring her words.
Gwinnett Medical Centre’s Dr. Chris Ritchey, who treated Nhajjah, said that the girl had unsafe amount of alcohol content in her body, nearly twice the amount of what’s considered legally drunk in adults.
According to the study there where 16,117 cases of kids ingesting the liquid in 2015. The child was transferred to a children’s hospital and kept overnight to be observed for brain trauma because the alcohol in her system had caused her to fall and hit her head.
Lisette Torres, a mother of three, admits she never really thought about how unsafe hand sanitizers are. It can also affect the blood pressure and heart rate, and the child may stop breathing.
Last week, Lopez sent a letter to Georgia’s school systems warning about children drinking hand sanitizer.
A new study has found that more and more U.S. kids drink hand sanitizer to get drunk. Some people add salt to the hand sanitizer, which causes the alcohol to separate from the other gel to distil the alcohol back into its liquid form.
“There are strawberry, grape, orange-flavoured hand sanitizers that are very appealing to kids”.
“They’re not mature enough to say no a lot of the time, and in this case, with the gelled alcohol, they make a punch”, she said.
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Experts said no matter how old a child is, parents should be observant and aware that something as innocent as hand sanitizer can be unsafe when misused.
