Accidental ingestions of oral prescription drugs

Accidental ingestion of oral prescription drugs by children under age five continues to be a public health problem. A telephone survey of 1,866 ingestion incidents reported to nine poison control centers was conducted in the spring of 1986. Accidental ingestion occurred most often with a two-year-old child (42 per cent) in their own home (82 per cent). Thirty-five per cent of the toxic drugs ingested at home belonged to someone other than the immediate family, most often a grandparent. Toxic drugs were more often out of their usual storage location and in non-child-resistant prescription packaging, a nonprescription container, or in no container. Twenty-two per cent of all child-resistant packages were non-functional. Overall, at least 61 per cent of all medications had no child-resistant barrier at the time of ingestion. Accessible storage locations such as the kitchen counter, table top, or top of a dresser or bedside table greatly increased the risk of accidental ingestion. These results suggest the need for effective child-resistant packaging that is easier for all adults to use

Accidental · Drug packaging · Environmental health · Family medicine · Grandparent · Ingestion · Injury prevention · Medical emergency · Medical prescription · Occupational safety and health · Poison control · Public health · Suicide prevention · Telephone survey · Emergency Medicine · Forensic Toxicology and Drug Analysis · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Pharmaceutical studies and practices · Pharmacology · Poisoning and overdose treatments · Pediatrics

• Accidental poisoning in young children

  D S Basavaraj, D P Forster•Journal of Epidemiology and…•1982

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