Every child medication poisoning incident is preventable
Innovative packaging solutions that reduce the incentive for adults to remove pills from the original container before they are ready to take them are needed.
Within 3 years of the Consumer Protection Safety Council requiring child resistant packaging, medication and household chemical deaths among children under the age of 5 fell by almost 50%. * ^
While child medication poisonings have continued to decline, they are still unacceptably high. ^
Currently, 5 children under the age of 6 are rushed to the emergency department every hour (50,000 a year) for medication poisoning †
A recent study of 4,496 individuals who had called poison centers found that:
52% of the time, the child had consumed prescription medication that had already been removed from the original packaging by an adult and either transferred to another container (such as a pillbox or plastic bag), placed on a table or counter to be taken later or dropped and left on the floor.
In 71% of calls for solid dose medication exposures, a child accessed medication intended for use by an adult, most commonly a parent or a grandparent and
72% of solid dose medication exposures involved children who were less than or equal to 2 years of age. ∆
* https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-392/pdf/COMPS-392.pdf
† https://www.safekids.org/sites/default/files/medicine_safety_study_2020-v14.pdf