According to a new study, infants younger than six months are often finding their way to dangerous substances and at risk from access to unsecured medicines. The research team has found that babies could manage sometimes to get access to medications directly. Another issue is that guardians may often administer the wrong dose or even the wrong medication to infants.
Poison prevention education is started by pediatricians only after six months of age, when they typically start considering the risks from exploratory digestion, according to the lead author Dr. A. Min Kang of Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix. However, he added that infants under six months young are moving around only on the areas where "their caregivers put them down."
The study analyzed data from National Poison Data System files. The information registered exposure calls from the period between 2004 and 2013, for infants aged six months or younger. Over the 10-year period, there were over 270,000 exposures and almost all were unintentional.
Half of the cases of infant exposure to dangerous substances were general, unintentional exposures, most of them involving the baby exploring and consuming a hazardous substance.
Almost 38 percent of the registered calls were for therapeutic errors involving medication given too soon or twice, dosing with a wrong amount, or medication delivered by the wrong route.
According to the report in Pediatrics, most of exposures involved a single substance and most happened in the home. Many of the substances involved were bath soaps or creams that the baby may put in the mouth while the caregiver is bathing or changing them, Kang declared for Reuters Health. He added that this type of exposures are not the concerning ones.
Medications including could and cough product, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, antihistamines and antibiotics were also common and they are of more concern for the authors of the study. These medications are in general not recommended for children under the age of six.
