Tide Pod Overdose Update: Utah State University Student Hospitalized

A Utah State University (USU) student was rushed to a hospital Saturday after an incident of a "Tide Pod overdose," which reportedly took place at the on-campus housing.

Eric Warren, director of media relations at USU, said it was unclear what motivated the student to ingest the Tide Pod, but added: "For students and members of our university who are feeling overwhelmed, we have services available. There are people here to talk to you."

Last month, a new kind of stunt went viral on social media — the “Tide Pod Challenge" — that can be highly dangerous and lead to health problems. In the challenge, teenagers stuff their mouth with detergent pods, biting them or even cooking with it. In the last few weeks, an alarming number of teens uploaded videos of themselves trying out this challenge, despite the fact that Tide and other laundry detergents are highly toxic are not meant to be consumed.

Earlier this month, doctors warned people not to eat the laundry pods due to health concerns.

"So you'll get burns to the skin, burns to the eye, a lot of problems that are more severe: burns to the respiratory tract, burns to the esophagus," Dr. Joe Krug reportedly said of the issue.

After the challenge went viral, with number of teenagers consuming Tide Pods after watching the videos online, YouTube and Facebook said they will remove material showing people performing the challenge. Tide also released a video in which Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots discouraged the practice.

"YouTube's Community Guidelines prohibit content that's intended to encourage dangerous activities that have an inherent risk of physical harm," a Google representative said in a statement. "We work to quickly remove flagged videos that violate our policies."

Tide's parent company, Procter & Gamble (PG), told CNN in a statement last week "nothing is more important to us than the safety of people who use our products."

"We are deeply concerned about conversations related to intentional and improper use of liquid laundry pacs and have been working with leading social media networks to remove harmful content that is not consistent with their policies," a company representative said.

On Friday, a student at Thunder Ridge High School in Colorado took a bite out of a Tide Pod during school.

Rocky Mountain Poison Center in Denver had 124 cases involving laundry detergent exposure, most involving children. Five cases involved intentional misuse like eating the packet on a dare or social media challenge.

Among the symptoms shown by children who have accidentally swallowed detergent in the past were excessive vomiting, wheezing and gasping, sleepiness, breathing issues, as well as corneal abrasions if the detergent enters their eyes.