kitsune t1_j67zrwz wrote
Reply to comment by Faustkatt in BBC News: Dad's warning after girl, 14, dies from inhaling deodorant by chrisdab
Yeah, now please tell me how you go about identifying the situations where they matter.
[deleted] t1_j681l24 wrote
[removed]
Faustkatt t1_j68530q wrote
I mean you would probably intuit that if you have a food allergy you might want to pay attention to the warnings on food. That if you were giving a toy to a young child you may want to check for small separate parts that pose a choking risk, including button batteries. I doubt you'd let children handle sprays of any kind without at the very least checking what happens if it gets in their eyes. If you're cleaning a room that can't be well ventilated it might be a good time to see just what you're in for if you breathe in the fumes coming off the cleaning products. et cetera, et cetera.
This stuff is mostly common sense. People are just fallible, they get complacent, especially with something that could be dangerous under the wrong circumstances but is also an everyday thing people use all the time without issues.
In this case, I fully expect their proposed change would be pretty useless. A big sign saying 'solvent use can kill instantly' doesn't even give you any additional unsafe behaviour to avoid—unless you're expected to stop using deodorant entirely, thinking you may at any point and under any circumstances drop dead. Realistically people will not stop, it'll just be one more line after the long paragraph of warnings already on that product, and people will still occasionally miss their cue to go back and re-read the warnings.
I'd speculate that if this is disproportionately an issue then a public awareness campaign probably has more staying power in our minds, and might give people a stronger indication when it comes up that they should go back and read the warnings. But even then, you probably have to be careful not to saturate people with them. If you see one for every case of a thing sometimes but not usually lethal, those might end up background noise too.
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