A bottle of hand sanitizer can come in handy when you’re squatting in a Kyrgyz outhouse and realize that your only option in the toilet paper department is your left sock. Every traveler knows that. But, according to a report on KSTP TV (ABC’s Eyewitness News affiliate in Minnesota), sanitary lotion has another, more sinister use – one that unfortunate children and delusional grandparents across the country are  discovering by accident; one that travelers across the world should be keen to remember: when ingested, it can get you drunk.

KSTP TV correspondent Chris O’Connell, who looks a little bit like a diminutive Conan O’Brien, is not afraid to take on hard news. The above segment finds him standing outside the Hennepin County Poison Control Center holding a bottle of hand sanitizer and staring into the lens with a look of sad intensity as if it hurts him to be the bearer of such scary but life-saving news. He warns parents who have already purchased hand sanitizers in order to ward off swine flu that they may have to get back to that store and go shopping for something safer. That is, if they don’t want their children to get boozed up.

“When it comes to your children would you give them a bottle of vodka?” Asks O’Connell innocently, the camera focusing on the bottle of hand sanitizer in his hand.

“Well you might as well,” accuses O’Connell with an ‘oh-no-she-didn’t’ head bob as the camera pans out to capture him in his full, investigative reporting glory. “Because there’s more alcohol content in this [hand sanitizer] bottle.”

O’Connell goes on to say that “children are mistaking the colorful bottles for juice” and that “calls are pouring in” to the poison control center. He doesn’t mention how many calls are pouring in, or how often, but instead defends his claim with an anecdote about Sidney, a young girl who got a little tipsy off the stuff a full two years prior to the report.

But children aren’t the only ones who should be afraid. While O’Connell was on the scene a worker at the poison control center fielded a phone call from worried family members after a 77-year old mistakenly drank “almost an entire bottle.”

But through all the platitudes that pass for news in this report there is one very important lesson to be learned: Hand sanitizers can get you drunk.

Wait. Hand sanitizers can get you drunk????

Hell yeah. I’ve been traveling around with a bottle that has the equivalent alcohol content to a BOTTLE OF VODKA this whole time? Thank you swine flu. And a big thanks to the hand-sanitizer pioneers out there like little Sidney and the elderly person who was able to get through almost an entire bottle before cruel family members ripped it from his or her hand. And, more than anything, thank you Chris O’Connell for such a riveting report. You’ve just answered the prayers of millions of middle-school kids across the country.

So remember kiddies, watch out for swine flu and the next time you’re by the campfire, be sure to ask grandpa to pass the bottle of hand sanitizer.

[Via: City Pages]