Kim Painter

Special to USA TODAY

A laundry product designed for convenience has quickly turned into a serious and common hazard for small children, says a report on the dangers of liquid laundry detergent packets.

The single-use packets — often called "pods" after the popular Tide Pods brand — sent an average of one child a day to hospitals in 2012 and 2013, the first two years they were widely available in the United States, says the report out Monday in Pediatrics.

During those two years, poison control centers took more than 17,000 calls, roughly one an hour, about children under 6 exposed to the concentrated detergents in the packets, researchers say.

Numbers for 2014 are not yet available, but the danger persists, says lead researcher Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Children ages 1 and 2 — old enough to be mobile but too young to recognize danger — are most at risk, he says. "These products are colorful. They can look like candy or juice to a young child."

In typical cases, children bite or poke though the thin, dissolvable packet membrane and "get this concentrated squirt of detergent down their throats" or in their eyes, he says.

The children tend to get much sicker than those exposed to traditional laundry detergent, though it is not clear why, Smith says. Vomiting and coughing are common; in rarer cases, comas, seizures and breathing problems occur. The researchers found one confirmed death and more than 100 cases in which children had to be put on breathing machines.

Since initial reports surfaced, manufacturers have added prominent warning labels and made packaging harder to open and potentially less attractive to children. For example, Procter & Gamble now puts Tide Pods in opaque tubs and bags.

Smith and colleagues found that calls to poison centers about the products started to decline in late 2013. Packaging changes and education efforts by manufacturers, pediatricians and others may have contributed, they say. But Smith says that for unknown reasons, poison centers typically get fewer calls in the later months of the year, so data from 2014 will be needed to see if there is a sustained decline.

In any case, the report says, "It is not clear that the pod containers of any brand currently on the market are truly child-resistant." The researchers call for new voluntary packaging standards. An effort to develop such standards is underway and manufacturers are involved in the process, according to a statement from the American Cleaning Institute.

The institute, which represents companies that make cleaning products, says it is important to remind parents and other caregivers to keep laundry packets and all other household cleaners away from children.

Smith goes further and advises parents of children younger than 4 to use only traditional laundry detergent. Those who use the packets should store them out of sight, out of reach and, ideally, under lock and key, he says.