abpi News
By the time this column is read, we may well have seen the publication of the Medicines Control Agency proposals for the application of the new British Standard for the testing of child resistance of non-recloseable pharmaceutical packaging.
The standard has been many years in gestation and the final version represents a reasonable consensus for a way forward in this area. If, as expected, the MCA seeks in the first instance to apply the standard to aspirin, paracetamol and iron products, it will represent a logical extension of the current requirements for recloseable containers.
However, it will be disappointing if the recloseable pharmaceutical packaging lobby uses the occasion to continue to seek to demean the value of strip and blister packaging and, perhaps more worryingly, undermine attempts to foster in parents an understanding of the necessity for proper storage of medicines.
To raise public expectations that we will see a dramatic fall in child ingestion incidents due to the implementation of the standard would be at best disingenuous and at worst downright dangerous. The data surrounding such incidents is open to selective interpretation by all parties and any suggestion, however inadvertent, that the new standard allows parents to 'drop their guard' has to be avoided.
We all have to bear in mind that any standard, applying to whatever type of packaging, can only be an adjunct to proper parental education and discipline.