Death by Tide Pods?!
I’m sure the question all you are wondering is can Tide Pods be the last thing you’ll ever eat? The answer is probably not. While the pods are no doubt poisonous unless you’re a small child only one of them probably won’t kill you. You’d have to have a feast with the main course being Tide Pods for them to be fatal most likely.
“Technically, yes, you can die if you inhaled or ingest a very large amount of laundry detergent — and a small child could die from a single pod if they got enough of it in their lungs,”
If you pods were to kill you, it would be due to the chain reaction of effects that come with eating the detergent. Due to the combination of a bunch of these side effects including inflammation and liquid in your lungs you’re most likely to die of respiratory distress.
“It causes an inflammatory cascade — so you get the irritation in the lungs, go into acute respiratory distress, and that leads to swelling and fluid pooling into the lungs which can be fatal,”
According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers munching on a few detergent pods can cause seizures or even comas. You can do permanent damage to your esophagus which can lead to something called “esophagus strictures.” The burns leave scarring throughout your throat that will leave it permanently harder for you to swallow and increases your risk of choking for the rest of your life. Do you understand the amount of drunk pizza you’re going to eat in college teenagers? Not much if your esophagus is scarred from a laundry detergent pod!
What to do if you are dumb enough to eat one.
If you’re even close to adulthood and you eat one you should call nobody because of natural selection. You didn’t make the cut, sorry. In all seriousness, if you ingest laundry detergent for whatever reason try and dilute the detergent with milk or water. Then you should call Poison Control (1-800-222-1222) if the symptoms start to get serious. These include irritation and burning in the mouth and esophagus, coughing, vomiting, diarrhea, and drooling in children.
“When you call Poison Control, be ready to tell them the exact brand and type of pod because they need to know the specific ingredients and concentration of them to assess the situation, Poison Control will typically advise you to wait and monitor symptoms. The good thing is that the detergent affects the body fairly quickly, so you’ll usually know if something is going to happen within an hour or so,”
I’m sure it won’t, but hopefully, some of this knowledge will deter someone from trying to snack on a few Tide Pods. There are plenty of things to put in your mouth that are way better than laundry detergent I can assure you. Here’s to 2018 being a year where nobody dies because we’re too dumb not to eat laundry detergent. We’re really setting the bar high for the new year people.