Flow Restrictors May Help Prevent Medication Poisonings in Young Children

Flow Restrictors May Help Prevent Medication Poisonings in Young Children

Flow Restrictors May Help Prevent Medication Poisonings in Young Children

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent this bulletin at 07/25/2013 03:48 PM EDT

Flow Restrictors May Help Prevent Medication Poisonings in Young Children

Each year, half a million calls are made to poison centers for medication overdoses in young children and the number of emergency department (ED) visits due to children getting into medicines is rising, with more than 60,000 young children brought to an ED every year because they got into medicines while an adult wasn’t looking.

CDC worked with the Georgia Poison Center on the first study  to examine how effective devices called flow restrictors—adapters added to the necks of liquid medicine bottles to limit the amount of liquid that can come out of the bottle, even when turned upside down, shaken, or squeezed—can be for preventing young children from getting into liquid medicines. To see how well flow restrictors work when an adult does not correctly lock the safety cap, researchers filled medicine bottles with strawberry syrup and asked 110 pre-school aged children to try to get all of the liquid out.
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