Lock up your medicine
September 14th, 2009 at 3:10 pm by Stephanie Harris under 10 On Your Side, Health
If you have children move all of your medicine way up high or better yet lock it up. We just put child resistant medicine bottles to the test with a kindergarten class at Christ The King School in Norfolk and boy was it an eye opener.
Of the 24 students in our experiment 8 were able to open the bottles. That’s 1/3 of the class. Our bottles were empty, but we used the same bottles pharmacists use for narcotics and anitbiotics. We also used over the counter bottles used for aspirin, ibuprofen and vitamins.
It took the 8 students on average less than a minute to get the bottle open. How many times have you walked out of the room for a minute and left an aspirin bottle on the table? From now on I’m definetly going to be more careful.
WAVY 10 News/Fox 43 News
This story did not surprise me. Child-resistant does not mean child-proof.
The testing protocols for child-resistance set by the CPSC require 50 to 200 children between the ages of 42 and 51 months be given a bottle and told to open it. After five minutes, the children are given a demonstration on how to open the bottle, told they can use their teeth and are given 5 more minutes to try. To pass the test, 85 percent of the children must not be able to open the closures before the demonstration, and 80 percent of the children must not be able to open them after the demonstration.
This means that a package can be child-resistant even with up to 20 percent of the children ages 3 ½ to 4 years of age able to open it. Once a child is over age of four, the percent able to open it increases rapidly. I think I am surprised that more of the kids you discuss couldn’t open the bottle given their age.
This should remind parents not to rely on packaging to secure their medication and to talk with their kids about poisoning and medication safety.