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Pills Kill Kids Because Adults Make it Easy
New study finds parents and grandparents frequently remove drugs from child-proof containers and leave them lying around
Meds, meds, meds. The more adults take, the more there are for kids to get into. Some 50,000 children end up in emergency rooms every year after eating pills that weren’t for them, and a new study finds that more than half the time, adults had removed the pills from child-proof containers.
Most often, the pills belonged to the childrens’ parents. “However, for some prescription medications that can be very harmful to young children in small amounts (e.g., diabetes or cardiac medications), over half belonged to grandparents,” researchers report in the Journal of Pediatrics.
More than 70% of the cases involved children 2 years old or younger.
The consequences can be grave. In a separate study, published in the journal JAMA Open Network, researchers determined that between 1999 and 2016, 8,986 children and adolescents died from poisonings by illicit and prescription opioids. Over those years, the rate of these deaths grew 268%.
And that’s just one type of drug. The opportunities are many.
