Teen Trend Alert 🚨: Dangerous Hand Sanitizer Drinking Leads to Hospitalizations in California

As many as six California teenagers were hospitalized with alcohol poisoning last month, and two last weekend alone, from drinking hand sanitizer.

Coming on the heels of cough medicine, hand sanitizer is the latest in a string of household products used to induce intoxication, and it has public health officials worried, as a few squirts of hand sanitizer could equal a couple of shots of hard liquor.

"This is a rapidly emerging trend," Dr. Cyrus Rangan, medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles, said in a news conference today.

About 2,600 cases have been reported in California since 2010, but it's become a national problem.

"It's not just localized to us," Helen Arbogast, an injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told ABC News today. "Since 2009 we can see on YouTube it's in all regions of the country. We see it in the South, in the Midwest, in the East."

For more on this story, click here: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/04/teens-getting-drunk-on-hand-sanitizer/