Warning: Beveragelike bottle holds cleaner

Colgate-Palmolive's Fabuloso cleaner looks a lot like a sports drink. And poison control centers — including the one run by the University of Utah — have been getting calls about the colorful liquid in the beveragelike bottle.

Not a huge number of calls, mind you. So far this year, the Utah Poison Control Center has taken 20,858 calls about someone eating or drinking a cleaning product. Fabuloso accounted for 34 of the calls; the long-established Pine-Sol prompted 204 calls about ingestion, says Marty Malheiro, an educator with the Utah Poison Control Center. She chose Pine Sol to compare because it's a similar product with similar packaging.

But officials are still concerned, in part because the very things that make the cleaner eye-catching and attractive are what will tempt someone to pop the cap and drink it. And they suspect the problem will grow as the product, which is fairly new, develops a broader base of users.

Fabuloso comes in colors like bright lavender and bright blue. The packaging is confusing the unwary, according to reports by the American College of Emergency Room Physicians, releases from pediatricians and a consumer warning from Consumer Reports, among others.

While Fabuloso doesn't account for a huge number of calls, compared to some cleaners, the calls are somewhat different. Of all the calls about ingesting cleaning products, more than 83 percent of the time it was a child under 6 who drank it. With Fabuloso, Malheiro says, almost 56 percent of the calls were about children under 6, with 44 percent 6 and older.

Experts speculate that slightly older consumers are more likely to reach for something that looks like a sports drink, but no one is sure that's the reason.

Malheiro tells of one Utah teen who came into the house hot and sweaty from basketball and grabbed a bottle of the cleaner that had been left on the kitchen counter. He guzzled quite a bit fast, Malheiro said, before he realized it didn't taste good and it burned. "This is a pretty severe irritant to the throat," she said.

Stores are not allowed to put products like cleansers for sale on shelves anywhere near items meant to be consumed. But they can't control where families put things when they take them home. They need to be placed where they won't be consumed.