Remembering the tide pod epidemic

 

It’s hard to believe roughly five years ago, several people nationwide reportedly went to the hospital or died from partaking in the “tide pod challenge”. For those of you who don’t know the tide pod challenge was allegedly a challenge where a person has to consume a tide laundry detergent pod without getting sick. You would assume that people would be rational enough to know the immediate consequences of eating a inedible, chemical-filled object but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. After all, curious kids and sometimes adults with a death wish still exist. In 2018 alone there were over 8,000 cases of people ingesting tide pods and this was all because the videos of people intentionally poisoning themselves were going viral on youtube. It also doesn’t help that people have pointed out the bright colors on these appliances resembled the look of candy. It quickly became an on-running joke among internet meme culture because of how absurd the challenge sounds. Sadly this meant more people decided it would be a grand idea to partake in this “challenge” themselves, leading to an immediate phone call to poison control and the hospital. As a result of the awareness of the tide pod challenge, grocery stores started locking up their tide pod boxes so they wouldn’t be so easy to access. If you want to hear an interesting thing I personally witnessed around this time, I walked down the aisle to see a cracked glass box with tide pods inside. However the tide pod challenge eventually, like every meme trend, slowly dissolved into irrelevance. Which means the poisoning from tide pods cases began to decline. More information about this bizarre epidemic is below:

https://www.dailybreak.com/break/myth-mayhem-did-people-actually-eat-tide-pods

https://kutv.com/news/local/utah-teens-taking-the-deadly-tide-pod-challenge