Important Information

My dear friend, Donna Kay, sent me a forwarded email that contained a letter (see it below) warning about the dangers of hand sanitizer. Donna checked the story out on www.snopes.com, and apparently the story is true. I know too many of my friends (and perhaps other readers) have small children. I'd hate for this to happen to one of them.

Ok. I don't know where to begin because the last 2 days of my life have been such a blur. Yesterday my youngest daughter Halle, who is 4, was rushed to the emergency room by her father for being severely lethargic and incoherent. He was called to her school by the school secretary for being "very VERY sick." He told me that when he arrived that Halle was barely sitting in the chair. She couldn't hold her own head up and when he looked into her eyes, she couldn't focus them.

He immediately called me after he scooped her up and rushed her to the ER. When we got there they ran blood test after blood test and did x-rays, and every test imaginable. Her white blood cell count was normal, nothing was out of the ordinary. The ER doctor told us that he had done everything that he could do so he was sending her to Saint Francis for further testing.

Right when we were leaving in the ambulance, her teacher had come to the ER because after questioning Halle's classmates, we found out that she had licked hand sanitizer off her hand. Hand sanitizer of all things! But it makes sense. These days they have all kinds of different scents and when you have a curious child, they are going to put all kinds of things in their mouths.

When we arrived at Saint Francis, we told the ER doctor there to check her blood alcohol level, which, yes we did get weird looks from it but they did it. The results were her blood alcohol level was 85% and this was 6 hours after we first took her. There's no telling what it would have been if we would have tested it at the first ER.

Since then, her school and a few surrounding schools have taken this out of the classrooms of all the lower grade classes but what's to stop middle and high schoolers, too? After doing research off the Internet, we have found that it only takes 3 squirts of the stuff to be fatal in a toddler. For her blood alcohol level to be so high was to compare someone her size to drinking something 120 proof. So please PLEASE don't disregard this because I don't ever want anyone to go through what my family and I have gone through.

That's it. I deleted the names and everything because in the end it doesn't matter who it happened to ... only that they were smart enough to put the word out. Again, this story was checked out to be true, but for those of you who HAVE to do your own research - more power to you.

J