Child death reviews are conducted by teams that often take a multidisciplinary approach when reviewing pediatric fatalities. The National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention provides resources for these child death reviews and maintains a reporting system that collects data from these committees.
By comprehensively assessing fatal poisonings among children at a national level, researchers were able to better understand the scale of this tragic and preventable public health issue. They were also able to specifically characterize the proportion of poisoning deaths that could be attributed to opioids each year.
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The study team used data from 40 states participating in the National Fatality Review-Case Reporting System on deaths attributed to poisonings among children 5 years and younger between 2005 and 2018. During that period, 731 poisoning-related fatalities were reported by child death reviews.
Opioids are Killing More Children Than Before
They found that more than two-fifths of these poisoning deaths occurred among children 1-year-old or younger, and more than 65% of these fatalities occurred at home. Nearly one-third of children who died by poisoning were supervised by someone other than a biological parent.
Opioids were the most common substance contributing to death, followed by over-the-counter medications for pain, colds, and allergies. In 2005, opioids contributed to 24.1% of deaths, but this proportion increased to 52.2% by 2018.
While initiatives focused on reducing opioid prescribing resulted in a transient reduction in these deaths in the early 2010s, in the past decade, new opioid sourcesincluding heroin and synthetic opioids such as fentanylhave reversed prior public health gains.
Additionally, while medication safety initiatives like unit dose packaging have shown promise in reducing these unintended exposures, the approach does not address all prescription opioids or illicit opioids.
It is clear from these findings that preventing fatal pediatric poisonings requires a multifaceted approach involving caregiver education and community-level interventions. One such intervention is improving the availability of naloxone for the public, which can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose and is safe and effective for use in children.
Source: Eurekalert
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