How Effective is Safety Packaging?

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Of 96 ingestions involving safety packaging [for drugs and other potentially hazardous products], 82% involved misuse. The package in some way was unacceptable to the consumer-it was too difficult to open or too difficult to close. Nonacceptance by the elderly was not a significant factor. In only 18% of the safety packaged ingestions did the child open the package. The child was more likely to be able to open the screw-cap and the strip-pack. The pop-off and press-lift were not opened by any child but were types misused only by parents. The older child with a record of prior poisoning was most likely to open a safety package. These children would appear to represent a hard core of risk subjects refractory even to safety packaging. Safety packaging has had a dramatic effect on the morbidity and mortality of accidental poisoning. Two remaining problems require further study: the analysis of technical factors impeding consumer acceptance and child proofing [the ideal package is so easily handled by the adult that misuse does not occur, but is too difficult for the child to open] and the personality characteristics of the safety-package-resistant child. Safety packaging, as implemented by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has had remarkable success. Education did not reduce accidental poisoning; safety packaging does. Pediatricians, pharmacists and toxicologists must work with industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to complete the goal of elimination of accidental poisoning.

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: