Death by tampon

As I'm sure some of you know, right now I'm working as an evening supervisor at a Big Gay Mart. No homo. Depending on your ability to handle getting cursed out (my main job function - seriously), it's a pretty sweet job. It doesn't pay shit, but I don't do shit either. Once or twice during a shift I'll have to call several departments to the service desk to pick up the various stray merchandise. Well today I was handing this guy a box of tampons (no homo) and I noticed that it had a warning label on it, not unlike a box of cigarettes. I was like, "Dude, I wonder if that's to remind chicks to take it out if their pussies." (There weren't any women around, no homo).

He tilted the box up so that I could take a look at it and it said something to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing here):

Attention: Toxic Shock Syndrome is a condition affecting a small percentage of the female population for which tampon usage may result in death.

I was like, "Huh?" Myself and this other guy (no homo) searched the box to make sure that this wasn't some special variety of tampon that had, I don't know, been dipped in Raid maybe to fight some especially nasty form of VD? But no, this was just your average, everyday piece of paper to be shoved up a woman's hoo-hah and eventually pulled out with a string.

Which got me to thinking: What could it possibly be about a tampon that would cause a woman to die? Based on the fact that it's called Toxic Shock Syndrome, I assumed that this was some sort of chemical reaction to the tampon. But since it's just carboard, or whatever tampons are made of, that can't be the thing to which women would be allergic. It also occurred to me that there's no such thing as being allergic to something that's toxic. I mean, if it's toxic, that would mean everybody would be allergic to it, not just a small percentage of women.

Then it occurred to me: They had to put that warning on there because women were shoving these things up their vaginas and leaving them stuck up there where they eventually began to rot and then caused them to get sick and die. I don't know for a fact if that's really true or not because I'm not actually a doctor, but, after several hours of pondering this issue, that was the best conclusion I could come up with.

If anybody reading this is an actual doctor or, God forbid, a woman who has had some experience with this sort of thing, please drop a line in the comments section and let me know what in the world is going on here.