Where the NVIC received an average of 107 reports per year in the past five years, there were 552 in 2020. So a fivefold increase.
The explanation is obvious: during the corona pandemic we started disinfecting our hands en masse with hand alcohol. And so we bought more.
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Most of the cases involved small children aged 0-4 years who got splashes in their eyes. Sometimes children also drank one or two sips. “Hand alcohol is usually on the table, at eye level for small children,” explains NVIC department head Dylan de Lange.
Hand sanitisers contain isopropyl alcohol and/or ethanol (alcohol). Concentrations go up to 80 percent. If children drink a lot of it, they can be poisoned, the NVIC says.
drunkenness
Small children can get mild intoxication symptoms from one or two sips, says De Lange. Think of dizziness, wobbly walking, nausea or headaches.
There can also be more serious consequences: too much alcohol in the blood can lead to hypoglycemia, a drop in blood sugar. In the worst cases, children lose consciousness or go into a coma. “That has not happened, but that is what we are very afraid of. That small children eat a whole bottle.”
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What to do if your child drinks hand alcohol
If your child has drunk half a sip of hand alcohol or has gotten a splash in the eye, then you don’t have to do anything, advises the National Poisons Information Center.
From two sips it is advised to give your child something sweet. That can be lemonade with a lot of sugar, or a sugar cube. This prevents the blood sugar level from falling too low.
From four sips of hand alcohol you are dealing with a serious situation and 112 must be called. “Then your child can sink deep into a coma.”
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If you get hand alcohol in your eye, that is not harmless either, warned ophthalmologist Tjeerd de Faber before. “It’s extremely dangerous,” he said. “The gel often contains more than 70 percent alcohol and burns the stem cells in the eye, as it were.”
Children can get a scar on their cornea, which makes it much harder for them to see. In addition, a lazy eye can develop, because they start to see through their good eye. In extreme cases, they can become blind in one eye.
Incidentally, it does not appear that extreme in the list of reports to the NVIC. “For us, it was a few splashes, which ended with some redness.”
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Not only the number of reports of accidents involving hand alcohol increased: children also ate vitamin tablets more often. Stories circulated on the internet stating that the intake of many vitamins could prevent corona, says the NVIC. So those products were brought into the house more often and children were given the opportunity to eat them more often.
In total, the NVIC was consulted by telephone in 2020 about 580 exposures of children, in particular, to multivitamin and mineral preparations. In the five years before that, this was an average of 450 times a year.
If such an intake happens once, it will not quickly have serious consequences. If you take large amounts of, for example, vitamin A, you can become nauseous, vomit or have diarrhea.
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