Hi, I'm Dr. Dan Budnitz, Director of the Medication Safety Program at CDC.
Child safety caps are one of public health's great successes in preventing child injuries.
However, more than 60,000 young children still end up in emergency departments
every year because they get into medicines while their parents are not looking.
One reason is that adults do not always fully re-lock safety caps after they use them.
We worked with colleagues at the Georgia Poison Center on an exciting new study
that looks at how well devices called flow restrictors prevent young children
from getting into liquid medicines, even if a safety cap is not fully locked.
Here some medicine bottles with flow restrictors.
Flow restrictors have been added to over-the-counter infant acetaminophen
and are available with some liquid prescription medicines as well.
Flow restrictors are designed to work with child safety caps and
are added to the neck of the bottle to prevent extra liquid from coming out.
Parents use a syringe to draw out the correct amount of medicine for their child.
To see how well flow restrictors work when parents do not correctly put the safety cap on,
we filled medicine bottles with strawberry syrup, and asked 110 pre-school
aged children to try to get all the syrup out.
When children were given medicine bottles with safety caps that were not locked
all the way, 82 percent emptied these bottles in just two minutes.
When children were given bottles with flow restrictors (but without any safety caps),
only six percent were able to empty these bottles before the end of the 10 minute test.
While the three flow restrictor designs tested in this study performed well,
not all designs may perform quite as well.
A next step is to develop safety standards for testing flow restrictors.
And remember, the best way to keep young children away from medicines
is to always fully re-lock child-safety caps and put the medicine bottle up and away
and out of sight of young children every time you use it.