Darwinism in Action
I don’t mean to sound like a sadistic jerk, but what the hell is this?
Doctors say it looks and smells like a fruit drink, but the taste isn’t so great. And the aftereffects, well, would someone call the poison center?
The product is Fabuloso, a cleaning fluid that children — and even some adults — mistake for a drink, ending up sick, according to a Texas study being released today by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The study by doctors at Darnall Army Medical Center found 104 records of Fabuloso poisonings at the Texas Poison Center Network between January and April. Three patients were from Austin, said Douglas Borys, director of the Central Texas Poison Center at Scott & White Memorial Hospital.
Doctors at Darnall noticed children coming into the emergency room after drinking Fabuloso and wondered why. They found that Fabuloso’s liter bottles, especially its yellow Limon, green Fresco Aman and blue Ocean Fresh varieties, resemble popular drinks.
“It smells very fruity,” said study co-author Dr. Marc Levsky, an emergency doctor at Darnall, the Fort Hood hospital that mainly serves military families. “It smells like it would taste good.”
Good God! What sort of “sports drink” features a picture on the bottle of a mop and bucket?
In the immortal words of Frasier Crane, “If only there had been some clue.”
When I was a schoolteacher, I used to think about the possibilities of teaching my kids an entire unit about the important terms that they would see in everyday life: stuff like reading product labels, fine print, advertisements, street signs, etc. I still think it’s a valuable idea because, if our schools are going to keep on churning out semi-literate cleaning agent-drinkers, we can at least teach them a few words that might keep them from poisoning themselves.
