Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Lawyers’ Blog

New Study Offers Reminder to Parents to Secure Medications at Home

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds parents about the importance of securing medications in the home, and adhering to dosing recommendations.  Focusing only on the medication overdoses that resulted to a trip to an emergency department, the researchers' findings were rather astounishing:

• More than 70,000 children under the age of 18 years visit an emergency room annually due to an unintentional medication overdose.
• One out of every 180 children aged 2 visit an emergency department annually for a medication overdose.
• Most medication overdoses involved children under the age of 5 years old were due to the unsupervised ingestion of medication.  Of note, however, there is also a siginficant number of medication overdoses involving adolescences between the ages of 12-18 years old.  These latter overdoses were most often caused by misuse and medication errors.
• Current child-resistant packaging, while helpful, is not alone sufficient to prevent children's access to medication.