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In general, it's a good idea to have the number of the poison control center handy.

That's an even better plan if you have laundry detergent and small children at home.

For decades, poison centers received many calls each year about children swallowing laundry detergent or getting it in their eyes.

That problem has gotten worse due to new highly concentrated single-load liquid laundry detergent packets.

The pods are brightly colored and children want to play with them and put them in their mouths.

In some cases, the effects are more series than when children have ingested regular laundry detergent.

A study released today by the American Association of Poison Control centers, published in Pediatrics, says: Some children who have gotten the product in their mouths have had excessive vomiting, wheezing and gasping. Some get very sleepy. Some have had breathing problems serious enough to need a ventilator to help them breathe. There have also been reports of corneal abrasions when the detergent gets into a child's eyes.

The Associated Press reports that some manufacturers already have revised packaging and labels in efforts to make the detergent packets or pods safer for children.

The study found calls dipped slightly after some of those changes were made.

Poison control centers and the Consumer Product Safety Commission remind parents not to let children handle the pods, and to store the pakcets so children can't see them or reach them.

detergent Pods

Ebola is threatening to reverse years of educational progress in West Africa. The virus has kept school closed for months in a part of the world where literacy rates are low and school systems are only now recovering from years of civil war.

In Liberia, many children have been put to work while schools are closed, and Ebola is hurting the economy, says Laurent Duvillier, a communication specialist at UNICEF. The fear now, he says, is that many of these children will never return to school.

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Linda Barrolle-Saygbe says her two adolescent daughters study for two hours each day while schools are closed. But Barrolle-Saygbe is frustrated that the girls' career aspirations have been put on hold. Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR

Linda Barrolle-Saygbe says her two adolescent daughters study for two hours each day while schools are closed. But Barrolle-Saygbe is frustrated that the girls' career aspirations have been put on hold.

Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR

The risk is especially high for girls, who until recently received much less schooling than boys, Duvillier says. "Families may be tempted to keep the eldest girl at home to help them or to wash clothes for the neighbors," he says. "We don't want those girls to drop out of school because of Ebola."

The school closures have been a challenge even for families with the resources to supervise and educate their children on their own.

Linda Barrolle-Saygbe, who works for the Liberian Ministry of Justice, wanted to hire a tutor to work with her two daughters and other children who live in her compound about an hour from Monrovia. She abandoned the idea because of a government ban on gatherings of people — and because of her own fears that the classes might put her daughters at risk of getting Ebola.

Instead, Barrolle-Saygbe and her husband are having the girls study for two hours a day. "They don't go out," she says. "The only place we go is church."

"It's very sad," says Barrolle-Saygbe's daughter Sharon, who is 18 and would have been a high school senior this year. The school closures will delay her plans to go to college and study information technology, she says.

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Sharon's younger sister Issabelle, who is 12 and wants to be a journalist, says she misses her teachers and friends and "having fun."

Closing schools was probably necessary to stop the spread of Rbola, Barrolle-Saygbe says. But she worries now that her daughters could lose an entire year of education. "The time is too long. And if they are not doing anything, they will fall way, way back," she says.

Children from less affluent families face much more serious risks, Duvillier says. "The kids play everywhere," he says. "We don't know where they go. They're roaming and actually it's increasing the risk [of Ebola] because we never know if they may enter the home and not wash their hands."

The longer schools in West Africa remain closed, the greater the risk that kids will drop out. But schools can't reopen until they are sure students will be safe from Ebola, Duvillier says. That means training teachers how to prevent infections and installing hand-washing stations at the entrance of every school. Both of those simple requirements represent "a very big logistical challenge," Duvillier says, and could take weeks or months.

During Liberia's civil war, which ended in 2003, some children missed years of school. And literacy rates plummeted. The challenge now is to make sure Ebola does not have a similar effect, Duvillier says.

ebola

Education

Liberia

Global Health

On racial tensions he faced in the Los Angeles Philharmonic

Most people were fine ... I do remember meeting a concert pianist and he says he almost fainted when he saw me sitting there. He says, "You're so starkly black [against all the orchestra's white faces], there you were in the LA Philharmonic." ...

I had a nickname ... Boston Blackie. No one had ever called me that personally but many people came to tell me that that's how I was referred to.

And then there was a Chinese guy, very young, came up to me and he said, "Welcome. Bob, now that you're here, try and get as many black people where you are." He says, "That's how things change." And he became my first friend in the orchestra.

On what he wants people to take away from the book

One of the things that I think ... we're not honest enough about is, we tell young people that, "You can do anything you want, just put your mind to it." But that lofty paradigm defaults to: "You can do anything if we're comfortable with it."

In my hometown people would say things like, "You wanna play French horn, I see. Have you seen anyone else doing it?" I said, "No." ... That was the mentality in my hometown. If it's different, right away, you're going to get resistance.

Or, in the case of my father, it was fear. Because my father, I found out just before I went to conservatory, that he actually auditioned for Juilliard. He bolted out of the audition because he ... could play bands, he could read Souza marches and he could play in the jazz band, but ... he wasn't classically trained trumpet. So it created a fear and a stigma, so when I come along a generation later saying, "I want to play French horn," he thought, "You think they're gonna take you? You'll see."

Read an excerpt of The Black Horn

classical music

french horn

African-Americans

race

From award-winning Broadway performances to the iconic voice that brought Darth Vader to life, James Earl Jones has an unmistakable presence on stage and on screen.

He's 83 years old and back on Broadway, where he stars in the comedy classic You Can't Take It With You.

The play takes place in the midst of the Great Depression — a time when Jones himself was growing up in Mississippi and rural Michigan.

“ I didn't want to talk — bad enough that I just gave up. I couldn't introduce myself to people who visited the house, and it was too painful.

- James Earl Jones

He was close to his grandparents, who eventually adopted him, but he developed a stutter and remained quiet for much of his childhood.

"You know, I've told that story so much. I'm so fascinated by it because I don't understand it," Jones says. "I didn't want to talk — bad enough that I just gave up. I couldn't introduce myself to people who visited the house, and it was too painful."

Jones says he is still a stutterer.

"I don't say I was 'cured,' " he says. "I just work with it."

He likens it to his days on the family farm.

"Being raised as a farm kid, it was all about making do," Jones says. "Putting one foot in front of the other. You had to plow a field, you just put the horse in the row and you got behind the plow and you did [one] row at a time. And eventually you got it done — one foot in front of the other. And you take up a profession in this business, you got to accept that there's a certain journeyman stage to it.

“ You take up a profession in this business, you got to accept that there's a certain journeyman stage to it. For me, it never ends. I'm still a journeyman actor ... it's one foot in front of the other."

- James Earl Jones

"For me, it never ends. I'm still a journeyman actor. But you're on a journey — and it's one foot in front of the other."

Jones' journey to the stage had lots of unexpected turns. He wasn't always set on acting.

"I loved the army, I almost stayed in the army," he says. "I was pre-med in college and couldn't handle that. I considered being a priest at one point — I'm glad I didn't do that."

When he finally did decide on theater, he says it was difficult setting time aside to perform. So to free up his days, he took on a night job as a janitor.

"I cleaned a lot of toilets," Jones says. "Some of the most famous off-Broadway theaters you can imagine, I washed the toilets in those places. I polished those toilets shiny."

When Jones is asked to share the story behind his big break, he hesitates.

"My big break, good Lord, what a title," he says. "Oh, I wouldn't like to say that. That puts down all the other things I've done that ... maybe really were my big breaks."

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Muhammad Ali (right) takes on James Earl Jones in the ring. When this photo was captured in 1969, Jones was making the film The Great White Hope and Ali dropped by to help drum up publicity. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Muhammad Ali (right) takes on James Earl Jones in the ring. When this photo was captured in 1969, Jones was making the film The Great White Hope and Ali dropped by to help drum up publicity.

AP

But he relents: "Oh yeah, I'll say it," he says. "My big break was The Great White Hope," a play that premiered in 1967 and hit Broadway a year later.

Jones played the main character, Jack Jefferson (modeled after Jack Johnson), a champion boxer fighting racism both in and out of the ring.

In 1969, he won the Tony Award for Best Actor for the role. The story was later adapted into a movie, which he also starred in.

"The Great White Hope put me on the cover of Newsweek magazine," he says. "One day that week, somebody noticed you."

He says that role changed his life.

"I decided if I can handle a leading role in a Broadway play, then I can probably go ahead and get married and raise a family," Jones says. "I could afford to raise a family."

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At 83 years old, James Earl Jones is back on Broadway. He stars in the award-winning classic You Can't Take It With You, now playing at the Longacre Theatre. Joan Marcus/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Joan Marcus/AP

At 83 years old, James Earl Jones is back on Broadway. He stars in the award-winning classic You Can't Take It With You, now playing at the Longacre Theatre.

Joan Marcus/AP

At this point in his career, Jones says he's overwhelmed by the opportunities he's had and all of the people he's worked with over the years.

"There was nobody [who was] supposed to be well-known in our family," he says. "That was not supposed to happen. Something odd about it.

"I think I'm very fortunate that I can earn a living doing something that I really find enjoyable. I'd like to keep doing it. And there's some plays I'd like to do still, some characters I'd like to explore, and there's always good actors to work with."

broadway

Darth Vader

James Earl Jones