Parents of Toddlers: Your Kids Should Stay Away from Detergent Pods

The detergent pods can kill your kids or bring them to crucial health conditions or even death. Kids who are 5 years of age and younger should be carefully watched over for the possibility of getting poisoned.

According to reports, the poison control centers in the U.S. received 6,429 reports of children aged 5 and younger who experienced possible injuries from exposure to laundry detergent pods for the first six months of 2016. CNN reports that "Calls to poison control centers increased 17% from 2013 through 2014, according to an analysis of national poison data published Monday in the journal Pediatrics."

Children who have swallowed laundry detergent pods usually thought they were candies. They experience vomiting, wheezing and gasping and they become so sleepy while breathing problems immediately develops. Poison.org explicitly explains the serious effects of swallowing detergent pods. If a kid happens to bite it, the effect may be greater than coughing and choking but also trouble in breathing, coma, and possibly death. The detergent pods are also able to irritate the skin and burn the eyes. One record says a devastating story of a little boy:

"A seven-month-old boy who bit into a laundry pod. He began coughing immediately and was taken to an emergency room in an ambulance. An hour later, the boy was dead. An autopsy confirmed that the laundry pod was the cause of his death."

The numbers to call in case of pod poisoning or skin/eye irritation are 1-800-222-1222. The Web Poison Control team is committed to serve emergency cases related to detergent pods poisoning. In case of squirting the pod detergent into a child's eye, rinse the eye with running water for 15 minutes and make sure that you just open the faucet to run gentle water flow towards the infected eye. After doing so, call the Poison Control for advice. This kind of emergency needs wisdom and alertness for proper decision making. Every second matters.