We are certainly passionate about making sure we stress injury prevention during health maintenance visits at all ages—but nonetheless accidents can and do happen and these can certainly include ingestions in infants. So how often are poison centers being called about infant ingestion issues and what kinds of things are parents calling about? Drs. Kang and Brooks (10.1542/peds.2015-1865) share with us 10 years of retrospective data involving more than 271,000 calls involving infant exposures to medications, most of which involved unintentional exposures—meaning exploratory by the infant or therapeutic error in dosing by the parents. Just what the nature is of these dosing errors (quantitative vs wrong medication or wrong route of administration) are among the many findings reported in this interesting look at what families are doing unintentionally to expose their children to unnecessary medications or household poisons.
The results of reading this study is the antidote for what to discuss with parents, with even more focus on your discussion of medications and household poisons, given the pitfalls in dosing and safety reported in this article.
