The girl was picked up by her mother, Terri Hawke, from the centre at 5.30pm on Monday. But the mother soon became alarmed at her behaviour and rushed her to hospital, where she collapsed into a nurse's arms and was later diagnosed as being intoxicated. Her alcohol reading was 188mg, nearly four times over the legal driving limit. Woodward said they believed the girl had climbed onto a bookshelf and reached the hand sanitiser connected to the wall above while the on-duty staff member was putting on a load of washing in another room.
There was "no liquor anywhere in the centre at all" that the child could have got access to, she said. The mother has criticised Woodward's staff for failing to pick up that her daughter was drunk. Woodward said the only sign the girl was not acting normally was when she stumbled at about 5.15pm, but she put it down to the soles falling off her sandals. Woodward, who has removed the hand sanitiser from its position and put it in a locked room, said she would not be using the product again, instead sourcing non-alcoholic hand cleaning products.
"I had no idea it was 60 to 70 per cent alcohol content." She was relieved the child was okay. "That's the main thing for us." Doug Sellman, director of the National Addictions Centre University of Otago, Christchurch, said an average-sized 4-year-old girl would need about 40ml, or eight teaspoons, of hand sanitiser to reach a 188mg level. If she had drunk wine she would have needed one glass to reach the 188mg level, and 1.5 small cans of beer would have been sufficient.
3 comments:
How does this child know that the hand soap contained alcohol? If she didn't know, why the heck would she drink it? That is nasty.
Well, if she was like me, as a child I loved sniffing isopropyl alcohol from the medicine cabinet. I started around 4 and forty years later, I still like sniffing it. Anyway, parents had to lock that stuff away from me. I think the girl's attraction to it may not be a reflection on her home life, if that's the insinuation. She learned like I did. Someone used it for appropriate reasons (rubbed it on her hands) and she liked it. Sniffing leads to consumption?
I have a friend who as a child drank Drano drain cleaner, and it wasn't because he saw someone else do it, or it tasted nice. Kids do crazy stuff, and go to a lot of trouble to bypass precautions.
As for my friend, after years of childhood operations he's in his 50s and fine now, but with a pretty nifty scar from throat to belly.
Poor little chick, hope she's learnt her lesson!
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