Hand Sanitizer Found to Pose Abuse Risk

Medicine & Health / Other

(AP) -- Prison officials and poison control centers can add a new substance to their list of intoxicants - hand sanitizer. A usually calm 49-year-old prisoner prompted a call to the Maryland Poison Control Center after guards found him red-eyed, combative and "lecturing everyone about life." Other inmates and staff reported the unidentified prisoner had been drinking from a gallon container of hand sanitizer, which is more than 70 percent alcohol, or over 140 proof, the center's director wrote in an article appearing in the February issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

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