Hi All-

Just wanted to send you a quick email and warn you about using hand sanitizers with your young kids. We have been using that with Sydney in place of hand washing for convenience 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.

We had a VERY scary afternoon but thankfully she is ok. We were in the ER until this evening, after spending the whole afternoon there, so they could monitor her and make sure her blood sugars were stable. They said that someone her size would only need to have 3 squirts of it to get to the point of being .10 blood level.

She has always wanted to lick her hands after we use it and we have warned her that it is dangerous and something that kids can't do or they will end up in the hospital. Needless to say, we are going to go back to washing hands with soap and water because it is way to risky and scary to use this stuff seeing how little a child needs to be affected by it. We asked about long term affected with the liver, brain, etc and the dr. said we have nothing to worry about but we need to get rid of all the hand sanitizer in the house.

Just wanted to let you all know so you can learn from our lesson and not have to go through something as scary as this...

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