Something that looks good enough to eat can sometimes turns out to be a really big mistake.

Take those small, brightly colored single-use packs of laundry detergent that are becoming popular. To a curious toddler or small child, they look like candy.

But once inside childrens' mouths, the tempting packs can burst, releasing a concentrated blast of irriitating detergent. Already this year there have been at least 250 cases of illness from the packs reported to poison control centers across the country.

And the particulars of the illnesses are worrisome. Children vomit. More than you would expect, says Dr. Michael Beuhler, medical director of the Carolinas Poison Center in Charlotte, N.C. And the kids often get much sicker in a hurry. "Children grow excessively tired and lethargic," he tells Shots. Some then develop so much trouble breathing they need help from a ventilator.

"We don't have a good handle on exactly what's going on," he says. But the symptoms are worse than with other types of detergent that kids ingest. One hypothesis, he says, is that something in these detergent packs is acting like a strong, short-acting sedative.

Within a few hours those symptoms usually pass. The prognosis for kids is very good overall, he says, assuming they get prompt medical care. "It's really just a matter of supporting their breathing for that short period of time," he says.

There haven't been any reports of deaths, but an analysis of the data from poison control centers continues. The specific hazards posed by the detergent packs were only recognized this month.

Buehler says parents need to treat the detergent packs with respect. "They can't be left where a child can find them," he says.

For its part, Procter & Gamble, maker of Tide Pods, said Friday it would add a double-latch to the containers of pods as a safeguard. Those will show up in stores starting in July.

For what it's worth, injuries to kids from household cleaning products dropped by almost half to about 12,000 in 2006 from around 22,000 in 1990. Kids between 1 and 3 years old remain the most vulnerable, accounting for almost three-quarters of the cases.

You know all those lawsuits now pending around the country charging that the Obama administration's rule requiring most health insurance plans to offer no-cost contraception is a violation of religious freedom?

Well, a whole bunch of supporters of the rule are chiming in now to say that argument has no legal merit.

The dozen new suits, representing some 43 Catholic dioceses, universities and charities "have made a splash by virtue of their number, but when you take a moment to actually look at them, there's nothing to see," Sarah Lipton-Lubet, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a blog post. "The rule is constitutional, it violates no federal law, and it's incredibly important for women."

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The needle and syringe are icons of modern medicine.

But a device developed at MIT to squirt medicines quickly and pretty much painlessly through the skin suggests that the future of medicine could be needle-free.

The idea is to shoot an extremely thin, extremely fast jet of medicine straight through skin and into muscle. "It's sort of like a laser beam," project leader and mechanical engineering professor Ian Hunter tells Shots.

But because the jet is so thin — he compares it to a mosquito's proboscis — it's unlikely to produce much pain. Details of the prototype are published in the journal Medical Engineering and Physics.

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Nurses are the backbone of the hospital — just ask pretty much any doctor or patient. But a new poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds 34 percent of patients hospitalized for at least one night in the past year said "nurses weren't available when needed or didn't respond quickly to requests for help."

Since nurses provide most of the patient care in hospitals, we were surprised at the findings. We wanted to find out more. We wanted to know what was going on from nurses themselves. So we put a call-out on Facebook.

We received hundreds of responses and read them all: piles of stories about nurses feeling overworked, getting no breaks, no lunches and barely enough time to go to the bathroom. Even worse, many nurses say breaks and lunchtimes are figured into their salaries and deducted, whether they take them or not.

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Your chances of surviving a sudden heart attack may depend on where you live; some American cities have survival rates five times higher than others. One difference can be 911 dispatchers.

If they coach someone over the phone to give CPR, the chance of surviving goes up. There's now a push to make it universal, but some cities are slow to implement the necessary training.

Becky Cole was eight months pregnant with her fourth child when she collapsed against the bathroom door. It was January 2011 in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville.

"I got up to go brush my teeth, and that's the last thing I remember," she says.

Her husband, Jon, heard the loud crash and called 911.

"She's fallen down, and she doesn't look like she's breathing. I need an emergency ambulance right now," he told the dispatcher.

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To physician Larry Shore of My Health Medical Group in San Francisco, it's no surprise that patients give doctors low marks for time and attention.

"There's some data to suggest that the average patient gets to speak for between 12 and 15 seconds before the physician interrupts them," Shore says. "And that makes you feel like the person is not listening."

A doctor's impatience, though, is often driven more by economics than ego. Reimbursement rates for a primary care visit are notoriously low, and Shore laments the need to hustle patients in and out.

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Forgive me, if you're suffering from PSA policy fatigue.

But there are a few more things I thought you might want to know about the new guideline from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that says men of all ages should forgo routine blood tests to detect prostate cancer.

Research from Johns Hopkins suggests the chances that doctors will listen aren't great.

In case you missed it, which I doubt is possible, the influential task force concluded that the harms from PSA testing outweigh the benefits when it comes to routine use. The recommendation left the door open for men and their doctors to talk things over and go ahead with the test if they agreed it would be worthwhile.

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The drive to wipe polio from the face of the earth is in jeopardy.

Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan are the only three countries left where poliovirus remains endemic. But work to put the paralyzing virus on the ropes there is in danger of failing. Cases in all three countries jumped last year.

Weak public health systems, armed conflicts and corruption have hurt vaccination efforts. Now leading public health officials have proposed an emergency plan of action to get things back on track..

"Polio eradication is at a tipping point," says a report published by the World Health Organization today. "If immunity is not raised in the three remaining countries to levels necessary to stop poliovirus transmission, polio eradication will fail."

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