People are eating laundry pods again and landing in the hospital — here’s why you should never
This political candidate needs to come clean.
Three people in Taiwan have been hospitalized after eating laundry pods handed out as freebies during the country’s current presidential campaign.
The trio, who have not been publicly named, allegedly mistook the colorful liquid laundry detergent for candy, the Associated Press reported.
One of the duped eaters was an 80-year-old man, while a second was identified as an 86-year-old woman.
All three of the victims had their stomachs flushed by doctors and are expected to make a full recovery.
Most laundry pods contain ethanol, polymers and hydrogen peroxide, which are extremely toxic.
According to news reports, 460,000 pods were distributed by a Nationalist Party office on behalf of presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih.
Hung Jung-chang, head of the Nationalist Party office in central Taiwan, apologized for the incident.
“In the next wave of house-to-house visits, we will not distribute this kind of campaign material,” Hung stated. “We will also stress to our villagers through our grassroots organizations that they are laundry balls, not candies.”
Back in 2018, Fox News reported that laundry pods have been blamed for at least 10 deaths: two from toddlers and eight from senior citizens with dementia.
That same year, the media sounded the alarm on the “Tide Pod Challenge,” which took social media by storm. Hordes of teens posted videos of themselves chewing and gagging on the pods, manufactured by the detergent brand Tide.
A variety of other similar brands were also used by the teens, who took part in the challenge before daring others to do so.
The panic prompted politicians to propose a law stopping detergent companies from making their Tide pods look appetizing.
New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman and Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas proposed a bill requiring companies to ensure their detergent is a “uniform color that is not attractive to children” and is packaged in an opaque wrapper that is “not easily permeated by a child’s bite.”
