Laundry detergent pods look like candy, which is a problem.
Those laundry and dishwasher detergent pods could be one of the best recent inventions. Mark me as a fan.
The problem: If you have young kids (and probably pets, too), they probably shouldn’t be in your house or they need to be locked away every time.
The May issue of the American Academy of Pediatrics posted a study about the rise in accidental poisoning in children younger than 6 who tried to eat those laundry and dishwasher detergent pods. They looked at data from the National Poison Data System from 2013-2014. Here’s what researchers found:
There were 62 254 children younger than 6 years old exposed to laundry and dishwasher detergents from 2013 to 2014. The number of exposures to detergent increased over the study period, but the increase was greatest for laundry detergent packets (17 percent) and dishwasher detergent packets (14 percent). Eighty-five percent of children were exposed through ingestion. The odds of clinical effects, hospitalization, intubation, and serious medical outcomes were significantly higher for laundry detergent packet exposures than for other types of detergent. There were 117 children who required intubation (using a breathing tube), and 104 of these were exposed to laundry detergent packets. There were 2 deaths, and both were associated with laundry detergent packets.
So, thank you, Tide and Cascade, for making my life easier, but if I still had babies and toddlers at home, I might stick with the liquid forms for a while.
