FDA Issues Warning About Confusing Hand Sanitizer With Food and Drinks

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned Americans on Thursday that some hand sanitizers could present a danger to consumers because they are packaged in ways that make them resemble food and drink products.

Hand sanitizers that are made with alcohol can be deadly if enough is ingested, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said.

"These products could confuse consumers into accidentally ingesting a potentially deadly product," Hahn said in an FDA news release. "It's dangerous to add scents with food flavors to hand sanitizers which children could think smells like food, eat and get alcohol poisoning."

The agency said consumers and retailers alerted officials to several hand sanitizer products that were packaged in bottles, cans and pouches that made them look like water, juice, beer, vodka and even baby food. The FDA declined to specify which brands officials are particularly concerned about, but it said any that resemble edible products present a potential danger.

Some products contain flavors or scents that make them especially attractive to children, the FDA said. The agency said that the shape and coloring of a product's packaging also factor into its marketing to children and cited one example in which a hand sanitizer that looked like a kid's snack was marketed to children using cartoons.

"Drinking only a small amount of hand sanitizer is potentially lethal to a young child, who may be attracted by a pleasant smell or brightly colored bottle of hand sanitizer," the FDA's release said.

As the coronavirus began spreading across the U.S. earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that Americans use hand sanitizer with formulas that contain at least 60 percent alcohol to disinfect their hands whenever traditional hand-washing methods are unavailable.

The FDA regulates hand sanitizers the same way it does over-the-counter prescription medications and keeps an updated list of hand sanitizing products that it encourages consumers to avoid. Most of the 165 products included on the agency's list as of Thursday qualify due to recalls, formulas with lower than recommended percentages of alcohol or for including other ingredients that the FDA deems dangerous.

As states began shutting down in March in response to the pandemic, the FDA said that hand sanitizer-related calls to local poison control centers increased by 79 percent over those reported in March of 2019. Most of those calls were about young children who accidentally ingested a hand sanitizer product, according to the FDA.

The FDA's warning on Thursday served primarily to caution consumers that such products exist and did not specify whether the agency has received any reports of illness related to incidents of accidental ingestion. Newsweek reached out to the FDA for clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication.

The FDA encouraged companies that make hand sanitizer products to be careful about the ways in which those products are packaged and advertised to avoid accidental ingestion as much as possible.

The FDA's press officer, Jeremy Kahn, told Newsweek that the agency "will continue to monitor these products and will take appropriate actions as needed to protect consumer health."