By Robert Roy Britt: For More Info, Go Here…
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.
About 66% of U.S. adults use prescription drugs. More than half of adults regularly take four prescription medications, on average, according to a Consumer Reports survey.
Among the long list of drugs that can be lethal to children: sleep aids, blood thinners and diabetes medications, even aspirin and iron pills.
