Hand sanitizer should taste worse, FDA tells companies during coronavirus pandemic
Hand sanitizer can make people seriously sick, so the federal government wants it to taste worse.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is calling on the manufacturers to add a bitter ingredient to sanitizers so people will be less likely to drink them, according to a news release published Monday.
The message was issued as the coronavirus continues its spread in the United States. To help protect against the disease, health officials recommend people use alcohol-based sanitizers or soap and water on their hands frequently.
Across the country, shoppers have stocked up on sanitizers and other products used to kill germs, making them hot commodities.
At the same time, officials are seeing a rise in calls to poison control centers. Reports “last month related to hand sanitizer increased by 79% compared to March 2019,” according to the FDA.
What are the risks?
Most of those callers are reporting potential exposure in kids 5 years old or younger, as in the case of a girl who reportedly drank enough hand sanitizer to cause her to fall and hit her head, according to McClatchy News. Young children can die after swallowing the substance, the FDA said in its news release.
But this month, officials say there was a call about a teenager who drank hand sanitizer that had a taste similar to regular alcohol, according to the release.
“To protect consumers, especially children, it is important to make hand sanitizer unpalatable,” the FDA says.
That means companies should add denatured alcohol, which turns hand sanitizer into a more unappealing substance, according to the government agency.
The FDA also says manufacturers should provide “a Drug Facts Label, warnings to keep the product out of reach of children, information to get medical help or call a poison control center right away if swallowed and to supervise use in children under 6 years of age to prevent accidental swallowing.”
Kids can be drawn to the way hand sanitizers look or smell, so it’s important to know “drinking even a small amount of hand sanitizer can cause alcohol poisoning in children,” the FDA said last month.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 9:24 AM with the headline "Hand sanitizer should taste worse, FDA tells companies during coronavirus pandemic."
