June 7, 2007

Drunk on Antiseptics

Justin Katz

I was at a loss to choose a category for this curious bit of information — which I originally thought to be typical email-forward spam — but it seems like something worth knowing about:

Just wanted to send you a quick email and warn you about using hand sanitizers wtih your young kids. We have been using that with Sydney in place of hand washing for convience sake. Today she told me she was going up to her room to get a toy, while I was downstairs feeding Griffin, and after taking longer then it should I called for her. When she didn't answer I knew she was up to something and the bathroom door was closed. She got into the hand sanitizer and had ingested some of it. There wasn't a large amount missing from the bottle but I could smell it on her breath.

Within approx. 10 min. she was all glassy eyed and wobbly in her feet. As the minutes passed, she continued to get worse and got to the point where she couldn't even stand up or walk, it was awful!!

I called poison control immediately and they told me to take her to the ER right away due to the alcohol level in hand sanitizers. As we were driving there her speech became slurred and harder to understand and her eyes looked awful. They admitted her and did urine and blood tests and it turns out that her blood alcohol level was .10 — which is legally drunk. It turns out that the hand sanitizers (Purell) have 62% alcohol in them and the dr. compared it to her drinking something that is 120 proof.

And here I thought I'd come up with the worst possible abuse of the stuff when I've used it to clear my sinuses.

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Good heavens, Justin. Can we talk you into Vicks or a dab of wasabi? Something with a much lower potential of killing brain cells by the thousands.

Posted by: SusanD at June 7, 2007 9:14 PM

I didn't snort it or anything! It was just a quick sniff, and only once or twice. Honest. I don't have a problem.

Posted by: Justin Katz at June 7, 2007 10:10 PM

1. Hand sanitizers are BAD. People need to be exposed to germs so they build up tolerances to them. We used to eat DIRT and most of us are very healthy, right?

2. Hand sanitizers as 'health risk'. I love it. The ultimate justice.

Posted by: Greg at June 8, 2007 7:59 AM
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