Students at RCMS share different opinions about what they think of the Tide pod challenge: Most agree that it’s not a smart thing to participate in.

“Stop it, you’re going to kill yourself!” said Freya Nardelli,13, in Majestics.

All over the Internet, people are recording themselves and their friends eating Tide pods and posting them online. People, like YouTubers, think that if they eat these Tide pods, they will get views and become famous. Others are just eating it as a joke.

A Tide pod is a brand of laundry detergent from Procter & Gamble’s Tide brand. The Tide pod cleans your clothes. The company Procter & Gamble has been a laundry brand since 2012.

Eating a Tide pod is not healthy. So far, an incident of eating a Tide pod has not happened here at RCMS, from what Mrs. Little knows.

“I have not had a case with this,” Mrs. Little said, counselor of the Majestics, Dream Team and half of Trailblazers.

If an incident like this happened at RCMS, there would be an immediate 911 call. Then once the kid(s) are healthy and safe, the administration would talk to them about what happened.

“Make sure the student is safe,” Mrs. Little said. “It’s always a priority.” There aren’t direct protocols for an incident like this because there has not been an outbreak of kids doing it at RCMS, but if a kid happened to eat a Tide pod at school, the child’s safety would be the first thing that would need to be taken care of.

Eating a Tide pod is very dangerous. Tide pods have ethanol and hydrogen peroxide. With this mixture, eating a Tide pod can cause vomiting, sometimes with blood, seizures, pulmonary edema (when there is excess fluid in the lung), coma, respiratory arrest and death.

“You’re eating detergent, it’s going to hurt you, duh,” said Morgan Reese, 13, Majestics.

Last year, 2017, there were over 12,000 calls to poison control for eating Tide pods. From January 1 to the first three weeks into 2018, at least 86 American teens had to be alerted to poison control. Tide pods are specifically for cleaning, not for eating. Even though that is the main purpose of Tide pods, that idea might not always work in the eyes of a teenager.

Some specialists think that the warning labels are having the opposite effect as what teenagers see. The warning labels on products, like cigarettes and Tide pods, should be pushing kids/teens away from them. The packaging is have something called a “Boomerang effect” where they product seem appealing to them rather than dangerous.

There are many other challenges that are highly dangerous. Some others include the cinnamon challenge and the gallon challenge.

“More stupid than the cinnamon challenge,” Freya Nardelli said.

The gallon challenge, another internet challenge, involves someone drinking a gallon of milk in an hour and if you throw up or stop, you lose. Another dangerous challenge is the cinnamon challenge. This challenge has you or other people eating a teaspoon of cinnamon in 60 seconds with no liquid.

If you do the cinnamon challenge, you can get a dry mouth and start coughing, vomiting, gagging or have trouble breathing. People who try the gallon challenge can experience extreme vomiting.

“I believe that the Tide pod challenge is stupid and anyone who does it is extremely stupid and does not deserve respect,” Morgan Reese said.