Hand sanitizers are not so dangerous to babies that ingestion of the hand-cleansing gel has killed or seriously harmed a child, according to CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanitizers, however, are not completely safe for babies and pose specific risks to a child's health. Take precautions to make sure your baby doesn't become sick from sanitizers.
The primary risk posed by hand sanitizers arises from the fact that most of them are made with a high percentage of alcohol. Most sanitizers contain more than 60 percent alcohol, sometimes labeled as ethanol. For this reason, some sanitizers carry a warning alerting parents to keep the product away from children and to call poison control is a child swallows any gel.
Intoxication
The effects of a baby ingesting sanitizer are similar to ingesting alcohol. After all, the same kind of alcohol in sanitizers is found in Jack Daniels, and you don't want your child chugging bourbon, said Gupta. The New England Journal of Medicine reported on one of the only confirmed instances of sanitizer intoxication. A 49-year-old prison inmate became drunk after drinking hand gel, was treated at a hospital and suffered no long-term side effects.
Effects
After that report, calls to poison control centers about children ingesting hand sanitizer jumped dramatically. One parent reported finding her 2-year-old daughter "all glassy eyed and wobbly" after drinking sanitizer from a bottle she found. Of 17,000 cases of children ingesting sanitizer reported to poison control centers, however, none caused death or serious illness. According to the Oklahoma Poison Control Center, for most children, licking sanitizer from a person's hand is not enough to get them intoxicated. Ingesting as little as a tablespoon of sanitizer, however, can raise blood alcohol levels to the legal limit in a 5-year-old.
Precautions
The Oklahoma Poison Control Center does not advocate throwing out your hand sanitizer if you have a child. Hand sanitizer, after all, significantly reduces the spread of germs through contact. That makes it useful for helping to prevent your child from catching a cold or flu. The center recommends supervising your child when she uses sanitizer, keeping large quantities of sanitizer locked up or out of sight and never putting gel in an unmarked container.
References
- CNN: Dr. Sanjay Gupta Blig: Hand sanitizer risks; Dr. Sanjay Gupta; June 21, 2007
- Booze Ooze; Barbara Mikkelson; February 24, 2009
- New England Journal of Medicine: Intoxication of a Prison Inmate with an Ethyl Alcohol--Based Hand Sanitizer; Suzanne Doyon, MD, Christopher Welsh, MD; Fenruary 1, 2007
- Oklahoma Poison Control Center: Use Common Sense When Dispensing or Storing Hand Sanitizing Gel; June 21, 2007
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