A mum has issued a safety warning after her son accidentally squirted a washing machine liquitab in his eye and was left with burns and blind for three days.
Jemima Strain from Dudley in the West Midlands, has warned other parents of the dangers in letting your little one help with the washing after her son was involved in a ‘traumatising’ incident.
The mum called for others to ‘Please make sure that your children NEVER TOUCH these!’ when talking about washing machine liquitabs, in a Facebook post.
Can we just point out here that all detergents are chemicals for cleaning and children, especially younger ones, should not be allowed access to them, ever!
A spokesperson for Fairy told The Huffington Post UK: “We are very sorry to hear about this incident and sincerely hope the child is feeling much better now.
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people who use our products and their families.
“Fairy Liquitabs are safe when used as intended: and we urge all parents to ensure all laundry detergents are adequately stored and kept away from children.
“We support the industry-education programme on the importance of safe use: information can be found on www.keepcapsfromkids.eu.”
Which is a nice way of saying what we just did more bluntly and, will repeat. You don’t let kids play with bleach or other cleaning stuff.. well, same goes for laundry detergent and it’s on parents to keep that sort of stuff out of harms way and out of reach from children. Perhaps not a politically correct viewpoint but, nonetheless a sensible and valid safety point.
Ms Strain explained how it’s normal for her to let her child assist with household duties like washing, but this time when her son picked up a liquitab it ‘popped’ and squirted directly into his eye.
‘I had no idea how awful the contents are. After washing them out as much as possible he was still clearly in a lot of discomfort and pain.’
‘My husband rang NHS direct who told us to get him to A&E immediately.’
‘On arriving at A&E we spent over an hour and a half with a full team of nurses who had to hold him down and force his eyes open whilst trying to neutralise the liquid with a litre and a half of saline fluid to wash out his eyes.’
‘He was traumatised as was I.’
The family were then referred to a specialist hospital to treat the burns in his eyes and they were told that this isn’t the first case of a child’s eye being burnt by washing liquid tablets.
We sincerely hope that this serves as a warning and reminder that laundry detergents are not safe for children, they never have been and like all other cleaning materials never will be.
Please ensure that yours are kept away from kids or put child locks on doors where you store them, they;’re cheap and readily available from any DIY store.
