Out of harm's way

Pharmaceutical manufacturers go to incredible lengths to ensure that their products are totally safe. After all, the purpose of many medicines is to destroy and it is vital that their killing power should be directed against their intended target – for example, virus, bacteria or cell – without causing undesirable side effects in the patient.

But sometimes things do go wrong and even exhaustive testing fails to eliminate some unforeseen result, leading to the economically catastrophic withdrawal from the market of what promised to be a lucrative, blockbuster product.

It is ironic that all the care that is taken in developing, formulating and manufacturing the drug can be invalidated the minute it gets into the hands of the consumer.

Eighty per cent of non-fatal accidental poisonings occur among infants and toddlers and the proportion in which some form of medication is involved is alarming. Of some 30,000 cases of non-fatal accidental poisoning incidents in the under-5s in 1996, medicines were implicated in 15,900 incidents – just over half the total. This compares with just 20% for household chemicals.

The number fell significantly between 1982 and 1996, probably due to the widespread adoption of child-resistant closures. Which makes it all the more surprising that the creation of a child-resistant standard for blisterpacks has been so long in coming.

Opaque blisterpacks have long been deemed to be inherently unattractive to children because they cannot see the frequently brightly coloured contents. And even if they did gain access to the tablets or capsules, so the theory went, it would be in relatively small quantities rather than by the handful, thus reducing the risk of ingesting a toxic dose.

But as many parents have found to their cost, it is very difficult to predict how toddlers will behave at an age when they are starting to explore the world around them but before they have learnt what danger is.

The introduction of BS 8404 is bound to cause more than a few headaches for drug companies, packer/fillers and retailers. But a wholesale return to the bottle and CRC is unlikely: blisterpacks have too many advantages to be forsaken by the pharmaceutical industry. The ingenuity of the packaging industry will, no doubt, come to the fore in finding a solution.

Of course, parents must continue to take responsibility for their children's safety, but the protection of the youngest and most vulnerable members of society is something in which everyone should be prepared to play a part.