It’s every parent’s nightmare: an advocate of simple, green cleaning products, Green Prophet’s Sophie reports how her child was almost poisoned by Passover cleaning products.
The Jewish Passover holiday is associated with springtime, freedom and joy. The pleasure of cleaning out the old for the new and a good spring clean. Well the joy of the Passover spring clean took a very nasty turn for me and my family yesterday, and it was an an even sadder one for another family.
My husband took our son to work with him yesterday, and while in the kitchen he watched as our toddler played with a small water bottle. The next moment he was gagging and screaming, my husband quickly checked the bottle – it was bleach!
This is a heart stopping moment: an ambulance was called and our small, baby boy was rushed to hospital. Fortunately for us he is okay, but while in the Emergency another young boy was rushed in, unconscious, poisoned: he had also drunk from an innocent water bottle, though this time filled with pesticides and he didn’t survive.
Spring cleaning has become a madness of chemical cocktails to get your house sparkling and clean but along side this, people become careless and the rate of accidental poisonings takes an enormous jump and a large percentage of these stories have very unhappy endings.
Apart from all these cleaning chemicals being extremely bad news for the environment, they are also poisonous for your family and home, and you breathe in the fumes as you clean. The cleaner at my husband’s place of work had brought in bleach in a water bottle from home and left it in the kitchen – that is how simple it was.
This Passover, being green is not just for the environment but for your family too – use vinegar and baking soda and I promise they do the job very well and you will all be a lot healthier and happier.
Read more on injury prevention tips here.
Read more on green cleaning products:
A green guide to home cleaning products
Get your dry cleaning wet
Eco-Rabbi on Passover Cleaning
Image via gamenerd
So sorry to hear that, Sophie. Did he actually imbibe any or just get a taste? Is everything okay now with your son?
I have a toddler too and as much as we’d like to say that it “wouldn’t happen in our home,” toddlers get into everything and these stories are good reminders of how conscientious we have to be with little ones around.
Hag Sameach and yehiyeh bari,
~ Maya
The New Jew