Over 500,000 Kids A Year Accidentally Ingest The Wrong Medication

Medicines are more pervasive in the home than ever, which can become a problem when it comes to children and their curious minds. According to a new study from Safe Kids Worldwide, children get their hands on medicine they don’t need or take the wrong dose of medicine they may need more than 500,000 times a year.

That may seem like a pretty high number, but the numbers derived in the report were directly related to the number of calls to poison control centers across the United States. The report was published on Wednesday under the title "An In-Depth Look at Keeping Young Children Safe Around Medicine,” and found that every minute of every day, a poison control center is called about a medicine poisoning in a child aged 5 or under. That’s 30% more calls than were made at the beginning of the decade. Additionally, 86% of these calls were made after a child got into an adult's medicine.

Kids can get into medicine via a variety of non-childproofed containers (and some kids are smart enough to get into the childproofed stuff). The study found that kids will eat pills they find on the ground or laying in drawers, in pill boxes, or mommy’s purse. Maybe if these kids spent more time dominating at basketball or playing with their fathers, they wouldn’t get excited about sneaking around the house and getting into random pills. Either way, keeping those suckers far out of reach seems key.

Photo Credit@safekids.org