Read the Health Business Blog and save your day care business
March 16th, 2009 by 
David E. Williams of the Health business blog
From MSNBC (Woman Shuts Daycare Down After Children Drink Windshield Fluid)
A Scott [Arkansas] woman has voluntarily turned over her license and shut her daycare down after children there were accidentally served windshield wiper fluid to drink.
10 children, ages 2 to 7, drank the windshield wiper fluid on Thursday afternoon, according to DHS,but fortunately, no one was seriously injured. One child was kept in a local hospital overnight for monitoring.
DHS spokesperson Julie Munsell says the windshield wiper fluid was accidentally misplaced inside Bynum’s refrigerator. Munsell says Bynum then served it to the children thinking that it was a fruit drink.
But if she’d been a reader of the Health Business Blog she not only would have worried about putting antifreeze in her refrigerator but she would have a policy of never serving antifreeze-colored drinks. (See Time to ban “Glycol-ade”?)
Now might be a good time to bring back the taboo on funny colored drinks. One reason antifreeze comes in bright blue and green colors is so people will recognize it as poison and not drink it. This week, a man was charged with poisoning his wife by pouring antifreeze into her Gatorade. If that’s really what happened, the bright blue or green colored flavors would have made it easier to disguise.
It might be time to ban antifreeze colored drinks on public health grounds.
The one anonymous comment was:
Not sure about that one. Can’t ban colors because someone “might get poisoned”.
The next time you read an anonymous comment like that you might wonder why the person doesn’t want to attach their name to the comment.
Thanks to Mickey.
Posted in Policy and politics | 
6 Comments »
March 17th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Why not ban drink colored antifreeze?
March 17th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
You have a point there, J.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Couldn’t this person read the front of the bottle where it clearly says ANTIFREEZE?
For heaven’s sake–how long has Mountain Dew been on the market? That’s an antifreeze-colored drink!
I don’t think drink color is the problem here–I think it’s good old-fashioned illiteracy.
Speaking of colors, I have yet to see a blue antifreeze. And did anybody take SMELL into account? Antifreeze doesn’t particularly smell good, while antifreeze-colored drinks smell sweet like candy.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Windshield washer fluid doesn’t smell as bad as antifreeze since it’s watered down.
Mountain Dew is the exception that proves the rule.
Sure, she should have read the label but maybe it got washed off and maybe she was just rushed dealing with all the kids.
March 27th, 2009 at 8:52 am
According to the NIH’s page about “Windshield washer fluid”, “Windshield washer fluid is a brightly colored liquid made of methanol, a poisonous alcohol. Some young children may mistake the fluid for juice, which can lead to accidental poisoning.” Many windshield washer fluids also contain propylene glycol, a common ingredient in antifreeze, and many people use the term antifreeze to mean either the fluid for the engine or the solution for spraying on the windows (both fluids are mean to prevent freezing).
The fact that the NIH has a special page about such accidents indicates that it is a recurrent problem, and any company that is blurring the distinction between drinks and car fluids is contributing to the problem and likely to be killing people out of a desire to make their product look more interesting.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:01 am
[...] filter to get included in this one was pretty tough. Not only was my entry about the risks of antifreeze-colored drinks rejected, but the host took the time to rag on it in [...]