Child health experts are calling for urgent safety improvements to hand sanitisers after a six-year-old girl ended up in ICU with ethanol poisoning because she enjoyed the taste of her family’s product. 

The girl’s experience has come amid the COVID-19 pandemic when hand sanitisers became widely available and public messaging urged their use.

The authors, from Sydney Children’s Hospital Randwick, say the NSW Poisons Centre has reported a two‐fold rise in hazardous exposure to hand sanitisers during three months of the pandemic.

“Unfortunately the dangers of (hand sanitiser) in the paediatric population have not been widely disseminated considering the toxic and potentially lethal effects of this easily accessible, everyday product,” they wrote in a case study in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.