The EU has decided to make the packing for laundry pods harder for kids to open and to treat the pods with a chemical to make them taste bitter so little kids that eat them will spit them right out instead of crunching them up like candy and potentially causing corrosive injury to their mouths and throats. This is a good thing. Since their introduction a few years ago, laundry pods have become a huge problem for the poison control crowd – little kids see the colorful packaging and think it’s candy and start to mow down on the fragile plastic pods until they liberate the detergent inside. There have also been a couple of cases of elderly, demented people that mistake the pods for something edible and seriously injure themselves – a couple older folks have died from their injuries (basically the detergent just melts everything it touches). Well, just as they have gotten a handle on the OTC overdose situation by re-packaging Tylenol and Advil, the Europeans have decided to be proactive and require the pods to be much less attractive. So why can’t we do the same thing?
Here is an article on just how bad the laundry pod problem is:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/laundry-pod-poisonings-piling-up-1431632747
