The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) starts its advisory on preventing poisonings in the home with this phrase: “Young children will eat and drink almost anything.” That’s a good yardstick to keep in mind as you check through the house for hazards.
There are many other risks aside from the obvious ones in the medicine chest and under the kitchen sink. Some are easy to overlook, like vitamins in a kitchen drawer that are often advertised like candy. Others can take the form of fumes from stored fuels or unexpectedly lethal vapors produced when some cleaning products are combined.
Risks for children
Poisonings of young children prompt more than 2 million calls to the nation’s poison control centers and 80,000 visits to hospital emergency rooms every year, CPSC says. The greatest threat is to children younger than 5. And the CPSC notes that 70 percent of poisonings involve children 1 or 2 years old.
Child-resistant packaging has helped. It can be annoying for people without kids in the home, particularly those with arthritis in their hands. But the CPSC projects that more than 900 children’s lives have been saved since the requirements went into effect in the early 1970s. It’s No. 1 on the agency’s extensive list of safety tips, including these:
Keep medicines and household chemicals in their original, child-resistant containers.
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Store potentially hazardous substances up and out of a child’s sight and reach.
When hazardous products are in use, never let young children out of your sight, even if you must take them along when answering the phone or doorbell.
Avoid taking medicine in front of children. Refer to medicine as medicine, not a treat or candy.
Clean out the medicine cabinet periodically and safely dispose of unneeded and outdated medicines.
Do not put decorative lamps and candles that contain lamp oil where children can reach them. Lamp oil can be toxic if ingested by young children.
Keep the national toll-free poison control center telephone number, 800-222-1222, handy in case of an emergency. Find publications on the subject at cpsc.gov.
Handle with care
There are lethal traps in combinations of some household products. The most common is mixing bleach and ammonia (or products that contain them) in an attempt to increase cleaning power. Don’t: The combination produces potentially lethal fumes.
And aside from obvious targets like medicine chests, also check the garage and other maintenance storage areas for insect sprays, fuel for a lawn mower, drain cleaners, glue, paint and solvents. The American Association of Poison Control Centers (visit aapcc.org) has more checklists and help with poison proofing, including emergency first aid. And there’s some unexpected advice, like avoiding potentially hazardous products packaged almost as though they are food — for example, pictures of oranges on a cleanser. The advice is based on more than 4 million calls to the network of U.S. poison centers each year — an average of one every eight seconds.
Securing the hazards
You could collect all cleaners, medicines and other potentially hazardous products in a few high cabinets, mount hasps secured with padlocks and keep the keys nearby. That would be safe, but incredibly inconvenient — and there’s no point in using a system that will be left disabled because it’s too cumbersome.
Instead, try a Web search for child-proof cabinets. On a general retail site like Amazon.com, 113 different products pop up. Many child-resistant catches are easy for adults to use but difficult for children. That’s because most require two sequential actions to open, like push-and-twist caps on medicine bottles.
They also protect drawers, for example, where a spring-loaded latch works somewhat like the two-stage release on a car hood. One pull won’t do it. A hook on the hidden latch catches on the cabinet so the drawer opens just enough to reach in and release it with your finger. And because the system is concealed, children can’t learn how to use it by watching you.
That’s just one of many systems, including backups like a battery-powered cabinet alarm (about $20) that provides a delay for normal use but alarms if the door is left open.