The importance of clean hands has boosted sales of hand sanitizers and also has led to an increase in the number of calls to poison centers about children swallowing the gels.
“We get a lot of calls on it,” said Mary Hilko, public-education coordinator with the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center.
Last year, 238 people in Colorado called the poison center with confirmed exposures of ingesting hand sanitizer, Hilko said.
Now making the rounds on the Internet is an e-mail about a 4-year-old Oklahoma girl being rushed to an emergency room with signs of alcohol poisoning after licking hand sanitizer.
The e-mail serves as a cautionary tale for parents and has some validity, according to the website, which debunks or confirms urban legends.
Most hand gels contain about 62 percent ethanol, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
A child weighing 66 pounds would have to consume about an ounce of sanitizer to achieve a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, which compiles data from 61 poison centers.
A lick of the gel would not increase levels of alcohol markedly, but parents should be wary, Hilko said. There have been no deaths associated with the sanitizers.
Only three of 238 cases in Colorado were told to seek medical attention, and five calls were reported from a health-care facility, Hilko said.
Nationwide, 11,914 people under age 6 ingested hand sanitizer last year, with about 500 cases that resulted in minor toxicity and 20 cases of moderate toxicity, according to the poison-control centers organization.
The increase coincides with the boost in hand-sanitizer sales in the United States.
Between 2005 and 2006, sales rose 14 percent to more than $70 million in U.S. supermarkets and drugstores, according to the market firm AC Nielsen.
The largest seller is Purell, with $36.6 million in sales in 2006.
Purell’s website says that use of its product by children should be supervised and that the gel contains an additive that makes it taste bitter and undesirable to ingest. Purell is made by Johnson & Johnson.
“We consider it relatively safe,” Hilko said. “We always like parents to keep things out of reach and locked up. Teach kids never to eat anything without checking with an adult.”
For more information or concerns or questions, call the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center at 800-222-1222.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer can be reached at 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, an incorrect number was originally published for the Poison Help Line. The correct number is 800-222-1222.
