In Your Garage: `Very Toxic' Cleaners

WASHINGTON - It is sitting in garages across America, in bottles of cleaners and stain and rust removers: a toxic substance that, if swallowed, can kill children.

At least two toddlers have died in the past year from ingesting products containing high levels of ammonium bifluoride compounds that do not have to be sold in child-resistant packages.

Now, the government is considering tighter packaging requirements.

"This stuff is toxic, very toxic," says Dr. Ann Klasner, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis. She wrote about the problem in the April issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The hospital has treated two children who ingested Armor All QuickSilver Wheel Cleaner. One child recovered. Another has learning disabilities and difficulty walking and speaking.

Three-year-old Carly April Shanklin-Porter of Vancouver, Wash., died last August only about 90 minutes after drinking QuickSilver at her home. Her father said she must have found the clear, liquid automobile wheel cleaner on a kitchen counter while he and his wife were working in the garden.

Within about 20 minutes, she was in the emergency room, but it was already too late to save her.

About three weeks later, Clorox Co. voluntarily recalled the product, yet older bottles remain in many household cabinets. Klasner said people need to know that the same toxic ingredient is contained in other products still on the market.

"Just because you take something off the market doesn't mean it's not out there anymore - that the next kid rolling through my E.R. won't have taken it," Klasner said.

In fact, Klasner said she and her colleagues recently had a case involving an 18-month-old child who died just hours after ingesting a rust remover that contained ammonium bifluoride.

The government also reported that a 38-year-old man who unintentionally drank a half-cup of rust remover with ammonium bifluoride died within four hours. It also reported adult injuries, including a woman who had chemical burns on her back and stomach after she wore a shirt that she had previously cleaned with a rust remover and then washed.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering requiring child-resistant packaging for all products containing more than 50 milligrams of fluoride and in which more than 0.5 percent of the weight of the product is fluoride, Ken Giles, a commission spokesman, said Thursday.

These products would include wheel cleaners, stain and rust removers, etching compounds, air-conditioner coil cleaners, metal toilet cleaners and some floor polishes. A decision is expected within a few weeks.

"What's toxic here is the fluoride, but we're not talking about toothpaste or dental products," Giles said. "They have too little fluoride in them to be hazardous."

QuickSilver's active ingredient was ammonium bifluoride. Klasner calculated that one teaspoon of the product could kill a 1-year-old weighing 20 pounds.

Sandy Sullivan, a spokeswoman at Clorox headquarters in Oakland, Calif., said the substance is not found in any Armor All products now on the market. Clorox markets a wheel cleaner called QuickSilver II, which does not contain the substance.

She said that after Clorox purchased Armor All in January 1997, it put the QuickSilver product in a child-resistant, trigger-spray bottle. Clorox also added a bittering agent to the liquid to make it harder to swallow. The product was removed from store shelves altogether beginning in August 1997.

She said there was no way to know how much was in homes at that time.

"It's only really an issue in homes with small children," Sullivan said. "If it's kept in a locked cabinet and then used up, it's gone, it's history."

In 1996, more than 2.15 million human exposures to poison, most of them occurring in homes, were reported by poison-control centers around the country, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

Children under 3 were involved in nearly 40 percent of the cases, and more than half of the cases involved children younger than 6.