Why Do We Need Child Resistant Packaging?

Every year, up to 200,000 small children are involved in domestic accidents with intoxication in Germany; 15,000 of them need medical help afterwards and every year, these accidents claim an unknown number of children's lives. 60 per cent of these accidents are caused by inadvertently swallowed medicine, 40 per cent by household articles such as cleansing agents.

Very often, drugs, cleansing agents, acid, lye, fuel or products for gardening are indispensably needed, but they can damage the health of our children seriously. However, even if most  products used in an average household are not highly toxic, they must be kept out of the reach of children, because if infants get into contact with these substances, this can have disastrous consequences for both child and parents.

This is why child resistant packaging has been developed in order to prevent that children get into contact with the contents of the bottle etc. containing poisonous substances. There will not be 100 per cent safety, as adults should still be able to open the packages easily and quickly. And: The purpose of child safety is not to release parents and other adults from their responsibility for small children! Child safety represents rather the last means of security on which parents can rely when all other precautionary measures have failed.

Historically, the United States was the first country to introduce a standardized testing procedure which required that 200 children of a defined age and sex distribution had to prove to be incapable of opening a given package, while that same package could be opened and - depending on the circumstances - properly resealed by a test panel of 100 adults, again of a defined age and sex distribution. Since then, standardized test procedures based on the same principles have been introduced in many other countries. Around the globe, there are today various packages which have been acknowledged as child resistant based on a test described above. There are indications that the number of accidents in which children ingested hazaradous products has declined since tests have been introduced. To what extent this is attributable to child resistant packaging (rather than to other factors, such as increasing awareness of danger) is hard to determine, but there is no doubt that child resistant packaging has made a positive contribution to this fact.