Laundry Pods Can Harm Children

As concentrated laundry detergent pods have become more common, so have chemical eye injuries among young children. The small, colorful pods can be mistaken for candy by kids. Most of the eye injuries occur at home and result from children breaking the pod itself, and either having detergent squirt directly into one or both eyes, or getting it on their hands and then touching their eyes. We recommend that households where children younger than 6 years of age live or visit use traditional (liquid or powder) laundry detergent. If laundry detergent does get in a child's eye, the first thing to do is put the eye under a faucet and run cool water on it for 20 minutes. The sooner and and longer you can flush the eye, the better.