Three weeks into 2018, at least 14 people in Utah have called poison control for help after ingesting or being otherwise exposed to toxic laundry detergent pods.
In a normal year, the Utah Poison Control Center will receive about 200 calls for possible laundry detergent pod toxicity. The vast majority of those cases involve children under 6 years old, the center’s outreach educator Sherrie Pace said.
“They’re very, very colorful. They’re very attractive,” Pace said of the pods. “So little kids want to get their hands on them.”
Increasingly — and recently — teenagers “seem to be wanting to get into them as well,” Pace said.
Of the 14 cases of possible toxicity this year, “a few” are related to the so-called Tide Pod Challenge.
The challenge began as an online joke, tapping into people’s innate and then-unspoken desire to eat the shiny and smooth, purple and orange candylike pods.
The Onion, a satirical news website, was among the first to acknowledge the craving with a 2015 article from the perspective of a toddler titled, “So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods.”
A follow-up piece in June 2017 announced Tide’s fictitious debut of sour apple pods, which boasted all the stain-fighting power of the previous pods, but with “an extra burst of mouth-puckering fruit flavor.”
Soon, what began as people taking photos of themselves adding the pods to foods they were purportedly eating, like baking them on to frozen pizza, grew to people filming themselves biting into the pressurized packets.
YouTube and Facebook have since announced they are deleting videos of people participating in the challenge.
From Jan. 1 to 22, the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported 86 cases of teenagers across the country intentionally exposing themselves to the pods.
“We cannot stress enough how dangerous this is to the health of individuals — it can lead to seizure, pulmonary edema, respiratory arrest, coma, and even death,” according to a Poison Control Centers news release.
Typically, people don’t eat an entire pod — even when they purposely put them in their mouths, Pace said. The pods taste “nasty,” and, as the liquid travels down the esophagus, it burns.
Yet, that’s enough to experience toxicity symptoms. The most typical is vomiting, Pace said.
If the liquid gets into a person’s lungs, it can cause breathing problems. Those with asthma or other breathing issues can die from that type of exposure.
Because the pods are pressurized, biting into them can cause the liquid to squirt into a person’s eyes, burning them, Pace said.
Tide posted a video to its Twitter feed Jan. 12, saying pods should be used only for doing laundry.
Anyone with possible toxicity from laundry detergent pod exposure can call the national poison hotline at 1-800-222-1222.
