1.PARENTS are being warned about alcohol-based hand sanitisers, after a three-year-old suffered severe alcohol poisoning after getting her hands on a bottle.
The Agereports that the toddler was taken to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital in “an altered state of consciousness”.
“Her parents said she had been playing with a bottle of hand sanitiser with her one-year-old sibling before she fell ill,” the report says.
“After examining the child, doctors found she had a level of alcohol in her blood that was equivalent to five times the legal driving limit for adults. She was admitted to the intensive care unit where she recovered over 24 hours.
“The doctors estimated the toddler must have consumed at least 55ml of a product containing 70 per cent alcohol to reach that level of alcohol toxicity.”
Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, Dr Michael Barrett and Associate Professor Franz Babl said there are also reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting alcohol-based hand sanitisers which contain 60-95 per cent alcohol.
“The Victorian Poisons Information Centre received a total of 15,729 calls in 2013 relating to children aged under five years, and reported that topical antiseptics/hand sanitisers was the fifth most frequent source of poison to which this age group was exposed,” they wrote.
The doctors said people should be aware of the potentially fatal hazards alcohol-based sanitisers pose and they questioned whether current labels on the products notifying users of its flammability should also convey its toxic potential for parents, carers and children.
2.Dutch campaigners have used a drone to fly abortion pills into Poland.
The BBC reports that a group called Women on Waves flew the drone from Germany to highlight Poland’s restrictive laws against terminating pregnancies.
“Waiting for the drone on the other side were two Polish women who took the pills, used to induce a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy,” the BBC said.
Abortion was legal in Poland in the Communist era but is now permitted in cases of rape or incest, foetal malformation, or if the mother’s life is at risk.
“After the drones left, the German police tried to intervene but the drone pilots were able to safely land the drones at the Polish side,” Women on Waves said.
“The German police confiscated the drone controllers and personal iPads.”
3.AN American woman has died of complications related to measles, the first time the US has recorded a measles death in 12 years.
The report of the woman’s death comes as anti-vaxxers step up their campaigns against vaccinations, despite overwhelming evidence that vaccinations save lives.
USA Today reports that the woman’s measles was undetected and confirmed only through an autopsy, according to the Washington State Department of Health.
The report says the woman “was probably exposed to measles at a medical facility during a measles outbreak this spring”, according to the health department.
She was at the hospital at the same time as a patient who later developed a rash and was diagnosed with measles. Patients with measles can spread the virus even before showing symptoms.
The woman, who died of pneumonia, had other health conditions and was taking medications that suppressed her immune system, the health department said.
“Pneumonia is one of several serious common complications of measles and the most common cause of death from the virus,” said William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.
Measles kills one or two children out of every 1,000 infected, according to the Centre for Disease Control.
