It smells nice and it's soothing for baby. But who would think such an old-time product, a nursery staple, could injure and kill?
Baby oil, along with other common household oils for massage, hair, and bath, essential oils, eucalyptus and camphor oils, are responsible for at least 3000 reported ingestion accidents to young children every year in Australia.
Toxicologist Dr Naren Gunja from NSW Poisons Information Centre at Westmead Hospital says most parents don't realise the danger.
"Once the child has ingested it depending on how much they ingest then it could be too late. Over a period of time, the child can die," says Dr Gunja.
"It is a gradual process that can take several days, two weeks to die."
Mineral oils contain hydrocarbons, a real danger to the stomach and especially the lungs - which can stop working.
"A mouthful of baby oil ingested by a child is enough to cause it to vomit and if they breathe that into their lungs that is enough to cause lung inflammation ... if enough of that happens it could lead to death," says Dr Gunja.
Mineral oils are also used for cleaning, as industrial and mechanical lubricants, in cosmetics and even pesticides. And, apart from they've been blamed for a range of health problems - allegedly acne, premature ageing of skin, and other skin disorders, impeding normal cell development and possibly causing vitamin deficiency.
- Reporter: Helen Wellings
- Broadcast Date: September 24, 2008 TodayTonight Yahoo7news
- Johnson & Johnson Baby Oil - Ingredients - Mineral Oil, fragrance (As a result of this news article and
others, Johnson Baby Oil now has a child proof cap.
Mineral oil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mineral oil or liquid petroleum is a by-product in the distillation of petroleum to produce gasoline and other petroleum based products from crude oil. It is a transparent, colorless oil composed mainly of alkanes (typically 15 to 40 carbons) and cyclic paraffins, related to petroleum jelly (also known as "white petrolatum"). It has a density of around 0.8 g/cm3.[1] Mineral oil is a substance of relatively low value, and it is produced in very large quantities. Mineral oil is available in light and heavy grades, and can often be found in drug stores.
In the late 1800s, the term "mineral oil" or "rock oil" was first used to describe the petroleum hydrocarbons and associated products that were produced from wells that tapped underground reservoirs. The term differentiated petroleum hydrocarbons produced from underground sources from other common oil sources at the time, such as palm oil or whale oil. In today's petroleum exploration and production (E&P) business, the phrase "mineral oil" is most often used in legal documents to define and encompass all of the liquid hydrocarbon and gaseous products produced from wells drilled into underground petroleum-bearing reservoirs.
There are three basic classes of refined mineral oils:
- paraffinic oils, based on n-alkanes
- naphthenic oils, based on cycloalkanes
- aromatic oils, based on aromatic hydrocarbons (not to be confused with essential oils)
