New standard set to cut child poisoning numbers

Press, 28 May 1983, Page 15

New standard set to cut child poisoning numbers

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

Fifteen to 20 per cent of all children in New Zealand are accidentally poisoned in their first five years. Two-thirds of these require hospital or a doctor’s attention. The invention of bottle and container caps which cannot be opened by young children, while still accessible to adults, yrould reduce substantially the number of child poisonings. These devices are known as C.R.C.S — child-resistant closures. They have been available for some time, but have not been acceptable to everyone working with poisons or in the pharmaceutical trade. The Standards Association in New Zealand has long been interested in. C.R.C.S. First, it had to find out why C.R.C.S were not acceptable to some’people before it could produce a standard for them that was generally acceptable. “The first consideration from a pharmacist’s point of view is whether the container meets the requirements for storing the pharmaceuticals,” says the registrarsecretary of the Pharmaceutical Society, Mr John Ferguson. “Pharmaceuticals are designed

to be water-soluble. It’s no good if the container is child-resistant but inadequately stores the medicines.” This was the major problem with C.R.C.S when they were first introduced into New Zealand. Devices such as slot-in-the-top caps had been child-resistant but the containers had been useless for storage. Now, the association has produced a standard for New Zealand. Mr Ferguson was a member of the project committee, and was also a member of the equivalent committee in Britain when he lived there. There are no plans to impose mandatory requirements on C.R.C.S, but the Standards Association expects the Department of Health to try to implement a recommendation in the Board of Health report on child health. This was: “That the Department of Health adopt the standards to be recommended by the Standards Association for C.R.C.S and promote their manufacture, their sale

through pharmacies, and their use by the public as standard procedure, unless patient or purchaser specially ask otherwise.” Earlier efforts failed because there were not enough C.R.C.S which met the needs of chemists, consumers, and manufacturers. The Standards Association expects the new standard to ensure that these requirements are met. Newer and better C.R.C.S are already on the market. The Standards Association hopes that with a suitable scheme from the Department of Health and a good education programme, the way is now clear for widespread use of C.R.C.S.' There are two basic types of child-resistant packaging — nonreclosable (strip or bubble) and reclosable (caps). Child-resistant packaging has been used successfully in several European countries, North America, and Australia.

In December, 1978, New Zealand introduced legislation which re-

quired that certain common classes of drug be packaged in aluminium foil or laminated plastic, “reasonably resistant to attempts by young children to open it.” The drugs covered are aspirin, iron, paracetamol, barbiturates, phenothiazines, and tricyclic antidepressants.

In its report, the Board of Health said: “If child-resistant strip packaging were used for all tablets and capsules then more than one-third of all accidental poisonings requiring medical advice could in theory be prevented.”

There has been a marked decrease in the number of serious poisonings and deaths involving the drugs covered by the Food and Drug Regulations since they were introduced. Strip packaging may not prevent the child ingesting one or two tablets, but will significantly slow down the process compared with an open bottle. However, some medicines and substances such as household poisons are not suitable for strip packaging. The alternative is to package these with a C.R.C.