NOT THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER: Don’t Drink This “Kool-Aid”
Ten children ages 2 to 7 at an AR child-care center drank windshield wiper fluid by mistake, reports The Associated Press:
Doctors estimate the children, , drank about an ounce of the blue fluid late Thursday afternoon before realizing it tasted wrong, said Laura James, a pediatric pharmacologist and toxicologist at Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock.
Only one child remained hospitalized Friday in good condition, after blood samples showed "measurable levels" of methanol, a highly toxic alcohol that can induce comas and cause blindness, officials said. In moderate cases, it can cause nausea, vomiting, staggering and sleepiness, James said. …
The owner bought the windshield wiper fluid with several other items on a recent shopping trip, James told The Associated Press. "This product was mistakenly grabbed and thought to be Kool-Aid and put in the refrigerator," she said. …
The toxicologist warned that many antifreeze or windshield wiper solutions have bright colors, which can be mistaken for fruit drinks.
"I think the take-home message is not to have these products in the kitchen or where you're doing any kind of food preparation," she said.
No, the take-home message is to read the label on the front of the bottle before you use its contents, no matter what room of the house you're in. The fumes that result from mixing ammonia and bleach in the bathroom, for instance, can be as deadly as drinking either liquid in the kitchen.
The sizes and shapes of the bottles of Kool-Aid Burst and household chemical lookalikes are strikingly different – plus, none of the poisonous fluids say “Kool-Aid” on them. Unless you are too young to know how to read or are functionally illiterate, you should not mistake blue Kool-Aid for blue wiper fluid. The woman who ran the child care center was old enough to know how to read, but this is AR (.pdf; see especially pages B-1 and B-2) and the fees she charged were substantially lower than other day care providers, so one might wonder whether she was functionally literate.
BTW: To be fair, CA, FL, NY and TX all have higher rates of functional illiteracy than AR, but then they also have proportionally larger populations of unschooled illegal immigrants from Central and South America, many whom are functionally illiterate in two languages.
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