CDC - Blogs - Safe Healthcare – Preventing Unintentional Medication Overdoses in Children

Preventing Unintentional Medication Overdoses in Children


Categories: Medication Safety

January 20th, 2011 3:16 pm ET -
Boy looking at pills

Young children can get into medicines quickly

Author – Dan Budnitz, MD, MPH, CAPT, USPHS
Director, Medication Safety Program
CDC Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion

Did you know that every year more than 70,000 children are brought to emergency departments (EDs) for medication overdoses? In fact, in 2009, one in every 151 two-year-olds was brought to an ED for an unintentional medication overdose. The great majority of these cases involve young children taking medicines while unsupervised.

While there are far too many overdoses of this kind, the good news is they are preventable. How? No sophisticated science needed – keep large amounts of medicine out of the mouths of children.

One way to do this is to stop selling a medication. A CDC study found that ED visits for adverse events from over-the-counter cough and cold medicines among children younger than 2 dropped by 50% after these medicines were voluntarily taken off the shelves in October 2007.

But, we can’t just stop selling all children’s medicines. Plus, ED visits for adverse events did not drop to zero after infant products were taken off the shelves. All cough and cold medicine labels now say not to use in children younger than 4 years old. But of course, young children don’t read labels, and they continue to get into medicines intended for their older family members.

To help prevent overdoses from these and many other medicines, CDC is working through a public-private partnership called the PROTECT Initiative to encourage development and adoption of innovative safety packaging specifically designed to prevent medication from getting into children’s mouths unless a parent intends to give it. Such new packaging might use single dose medicine packets or bottles with a smaller opening at the top, requiring a parent to squeeze the bottle or use a dosing device to get the medicine out. Currently, this type of packaging is available for only a few medicines, but some manufacturers recognize the public health issue and have committed to expand it to more products. In addition, partners in the PROTECT Initiative will launch a new campaign this spring to educate parents and caregivers on ways to improve safe use and storage of medications.

While we look forward to improved, safer packaging and additional education, the most important way for parents and caregivers to keep medicines out of the hands and mouths of children today is to correctly replace the child-resistant caps on all medicines and put the entire container up, away, and out of sight after every use.

Reducing the number of ED visits for unintentional medication overdoses among children is a recently announced objective of Healthy People 2020External Web Site Icon., and a continued priority for CDC’s Medication Safety Program.

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