> For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.