Accidental Poisonings Increased After President Trump's Disinfectant Comments

Source: Time

President Trump’s April 23 musing that injections of disinfectant could help defeat the coronavirus did not do much for his reputation as a reliable arbiter of public health. What’s harder to determine is how many people—if any—took his advice and in some way ingested the toxic chemicals. The most recent bulletin from the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC), which aggregates data from its state counterparts, does offer some clues, however.

Even before Trump’s comments, accidental poisonings from bleach and other disinfectants were on the rise from Jan. 1 to March 31 of this year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, with people sanitizing surfaces, groceries, smartphones and more as a defense against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Most of the poisonings were the result of inhalation of fumes, but there were ingestion cases as well, typically among children who got their hands on chemicals left out in the open.

What’s key is what happened in the weeks that followed Trump’s controversial and widely debunked comments—and there does appear to have been a rise in accidental poisonings thereafter.

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Critically, association is not causation, and with a frightened public doing whatever it can to protect itself from the virus, the same increases in poisonings might have happened regardless of Trump’s remarks. But the presidential megaphone is a powerful one, and even dangerous ideas projected through it can influence an awful lot of people.

Read more: https://time.com/5835244/accidental-poisonings-trump/