

Tufts-New England Medical Center has taken measures to keep emergency room patients from chugging hand sanitizer in order to get drunk or injure themselves. Corresponding with the Annals of Emergency Medicine this month, Scott Weiner said that the changes came after a 27-year-old man poisoned himself by drinking a 15-ounce container of Cal Stat antiseptic hand rub – twice during a two month period.

In the first incident, the young man had been admitted to the emergency department for abdominal pain. When the staff left him unsupervised, the patient removed a bottle of the antibacterial liquid from a dispenser on the wall and downed it.

Since the liquid is mostly isopropanol, not drinking alcohol, he quickly became quite ill. Doctors tried unsuccessfully to revive him with naloxone, a drug used to treat opiate overdoses. As the situation worsened, his kidneys stopped working and he had trouble breathing. Physicians intubated him and moved him to an intensive care unit. At that time, his girlfriend indicated that her beau has a history of drinking rubbing alcohol. Blood tests showed that she wasn't kidding.

Two months later, after making a recovery and being released from the hospital, the same guy had done it again. He had come back for more. Just like the previous incident, he was admitted to the emergency room with complaints of abdominal pain. When the doctors were ready to send the antiseptic addict home, he claimed to be suicidal. True to his word, he removed another bottle of hand sanitizer from the wall and finished it off.

To prevent history from repeating itself, staff at the medical center replaced the dispensers with a different design that is hard to remove from the wall. They were particularly concerned because similar incidents had happened elsewhere.

This February, the New England Journal of Medicine published two case reports of other men becoming intoxicated by hand sanitizer.

When a patient in Cincinnati, Ohio began giving off a sweet but unusual odor, his doctors ordered blood tests to measure the levels of rubbing alcohol and acetone in his blood. Although defeat was a bitter pill to swallow for the doctors, their patient proved that hand sanitizer is not. Before the test results were back, they found him drinking the antibacterial goo straight out of the dispenser on a bathroom wall.

In Baltimore, Maryland, a prison inmate was caught drinking from a gallon bottle of Purell. To his credit, the jailbird had selected a variety of antiseptic gel that is composed mainly of drinking alcohol. If the prisoner had taken the time to read the What's Inside section of Wired, he might have realized that some of the other ingredients in his favorite germ-fighting cocktail were not meant for human consumption.