Hi, I'm Dr. Dan Budnitz, Director of the
Medication Safety Program at CDC.

Child safety caps are one of public health's
great successes in preventing child injuries.

However, more than 60,000 young children
still end up in emergency departments

every year because they get into medicines
while their parents are not looking.

One reason is that adults do not always
fully re-lock safety caps after they use them.

We worked with colleagues at the Georgia
Poison Center on an exciting new study

that looks at how well devices called flow
restrictors prevent young children

from getting into liquid medicines,
even if a safety cap is not fully locked.

Here some medicine bottles
with flow restrictors.

Flow restrictors have been added to
over-the-counter infant acetaminophen

and are available with some liquid
prescription medicines as well.

Flow restrictors are designed to
work with child safety caps and

are added to the neck of the bottle to
prevent extra liquid from coming out.

Parents use a syringe to draw out the
correct amount of medicine for their child.

To see how well flow restrictors work when
parents do not correctly put the safety cap on,

we filled medicine bottles with strawberry
syrup, and asked 110 pre-school

aged children to try to get all the syrup out.

When children were given medicine bottles
with safety caps that were not locked

all the way, 82 percent emptied
these bottles in just two minutes.

When children were given bottles with flow
restrictors (but without any safety caps),

only six percent were able to empty these
bottles before the end of the 10 minute test.

While the three flow restrictor designs
tested in this study performed well,

not all designs may perform quite as well.

A next step is to develop safety standards
for testing flow restrictors.

And remember, the best way to keep
young children away from medicines

is to always fully re-lock child-safety caps
and put the medicine bottle up and away

and out of sight of young children
every time you use it.