Every eight minutes, a child in the United States is improperly medicated at home -- that according to a new study published this week in the journal Pediatrics. Double-dosing, whereby a parent or guardian accidentally gives a child the same medication twice, accounted for a quarter of all mistakes.
Thankfully, the vast majority of mismeasurements and double doses weren't fatal, but the numbers -- which many experts say are on the conservative side -- suggest moms and dads in the United States need to be much more careful when dosing out meds to their children.
Researchers completed the study using data collected by the National Poison Database System between 2002 to 2012. Over the course of those ten years, some 696,937 children were given the wrong amount of medication. Just 25 of the children died as a result of a dosing error.
Because older children can often remind caretakers they've already had their medication, errors are most likely to occur when parents are administering meds to younger children -- with most errors involving children under the age of one.
Some 82 percent of all errors involved liquid medication. The majority of improperly dosed drugs were pain relievers, followed by cough and cold medication.