danemodsandy
Well-known member
Statistics are in from a year of detergent pod sales, and they are scary: over 17,000 American kids under the age of six suffered some sort of problem from ingesting pods or part of one. That's pretty much one child every hour between March 2012 and April 2013. The medical journal Pediatrics reports that 4.4% of these children were hospitalized, and 7.5% experienced a "moderate or major medical outcome."
When we were discussing this issue last August, I said this:
"....I also think that P & G has released a product into a marketplace that common sense should have told them not to put there.
Everyone and his brother and his little spotted dog knows that people are rushed, multitasking, self-centered, gabbling into cell phones and in general not paying nearly the attention to kids people used to give their offspring.
In such a social climate, the release of a product that damn near jumps up and down in front of kids singing, "Eat Me! Eat Me!" seems to have been a most unwise decision.
In a perfect world, detergent pods might have worked out just fine. The world we live in is not that world.
I have a good, hot hunch that liability concerns are going to bring the "pod revolution" to a screeching halt in the not-too-distant future."
Some efforts have been made to stem the tide of incidents. P & G has put a new lock on the containers, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission has asked - not mandated - that manufacturers create more childproof packaging.
But a kid an hour eating or getting eye damage from these things? That tells me that human nature is not up to the task of supervising children around pods, which says only one thing to me - the pods gotta go. A few incidents - or even a few hundred - you can put down to inept or inadequate parenting. A child every hour says to me: This. Ain't. Working.
I have a feeling that discussion on this issue is going to be lively.
Here's a link to a CNN report:
When we were discussing this issue last August, I said this:
"....I also think that P & G has released a product into a marketplace that common sense should have told them not to put there.
Everyone and his brother and his little spotted dog knows that people are rushed, multitasking, self-centered, gabbling into cell phones and in general not paying nearly the attention to kids people used to give their offspring.
In such a social climate, the release of a product that damn near jumps up and down in front of kids singing, "Eat Me! Eat Me!" seems to have been a most unwise decision.
In a perfect world, detergent pods might have worked out just fine. The world we live in is not that world.
I have a good, hot hunch that liability concerns are going to bring the "pod revolution" to a screeching halt in the not-too-distant future."
Some efforts have been made to stem the tide of incidents. P & G has put a new lock on the containers, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission has asked - not mandated - that manufacturers create more childproof packaging.
But a kid an hour eating or getting eye damage from these things? That tells me that human nature is not up to the task of supervising children around pods, which says only one thing to me - the pods gotta go. A few incidents - or even a few hundred - you can put down to inept or inadequate parenting. A child every hour says to me: This. Ain't. Working.
I have a feeling that discussion on this issue is going to be lively.
Here's a link to a CNN report:
