Jennie Lissarrague
Companies that make laundry detergent pods are finalizing new guidelines to make them less appealing to children.
Safety advocates say kids often mistake the brightly-colored pods for candy; the Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued several warnings to parents in the last few years.
Last year, Poison Control Centers received nearly 12,000 reports of children under the age of five ingesting the pods or getting the detergent in their eyes or on their skin.
The new voluntary safety guidelines include improving packaging standards and making the packets less appealing to kids.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been pushing efforts to prevent accidental poisonings by detergent packets; she cosponsored the Detergent Poisoning and Child Safety Act, which would require the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to set mandatory safety standards for easily-accessible liquid detergent packets.