There Oughtta Be a Law
Posted By admin on December 7, 2009
One of our local TV stations regularly does a health care bit as a community service. This one was particularly interesting.
Did you know that a very high percentage of children are poisoned by medications. In my state it’s about 45%. That is a very high percentage. There ought to be a law.
Well there is. There are child safe medicine bottles. You know the kind. I often have trouble opening them, but then I am way over sixty and sometimes I can’t get a grip on the caps. I just cannot get them open.
In 1982 the Federal Food and Drug Administrarion (FDA) passed their Tamper-resistant Packaging Regulations to prevent poisonings. That was a long time ago.
You have to ask why then are so many children still poisoned by medicinal drugs? One suggestion is that parents and grandparents leave the bottles open because they too have difficulty getting them open. Consequently, inquistive little tots get to them.
That might be a good explanation. Here is another, remember that TV show I mentioned at the beginning? Well, it turns out a bunch of kindergartners were given empty tamper-resistant bottles to open. The game was to see how fast and if they could open them.
What do you think happened? Yep, the bottles were opened. Some were opened in less than a minute! I checked around and found that throughout the country the results are the same.
This begs the question, are our children any safer now than they were before 1982? I doubt it. Ultimately, it is the adults’ responsibilty to keep children out of harm’s way.
All this raises another question, who paid for this? Who has paid for the salaries of the enforcers, the bureaucrats, the designers, engineers, and the maufacturers of the tamper-resistant bottle caps? Can you guess? Yes, you are right again. You and I.
If there were a proven benefit, then maybe it would have been worth it . There hasn’t been.
Just another law by those who know better than you do,what is best for your welfare.
Am I right?
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