274
submitted 7 months ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/news@lemmy.world

Four New Hampshire daycare employees allegedly spiked children’s food with the sleep supplement melatonin and were arrested on Thursday.

After a six-month investigation, police discovered that children had been furtively dosed with melatonin. Officers arrested the daycare owner, 52-year-old Sally Dreckmann, along with three of her employees: Traci Innie, 51; Kaitlin Filardo and Jessica Foster, who are both 23.

Melatonin is a sleep aid supplement that is sold over the counter. But the long-term impacts of melatonin on children are not widely known.

Furthermore, there have been several reports of children being overdosed with melatonin in recent years. About 7% of emergency department visits between 2012 and 2021 were for children who had accidentally ingested melatonin, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health warning for melatonin use around kids and adolescents, warning against the lack of US Food and Drug Administration oversight for the sleep aid.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 13 points 7 months ago

The article said 7% of all emergency visits (with no qualifier). You said 7% of visits by children which sounds more reasonable. The actual statistic is even more specific than that.

During 2019–2022, melatonin was implicated in 7% of all ED visits for unsupervised medication exposures by infants and young children.

- https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/pdfs/mm7309a5-H.pdf

The article links a summary of the wrong CDC report (June 2022) that does not contain this stat. The report that this stat comes from (quoted above) was published in March 2024 by a completely different group of researchers.

And why did the article say the statistic was for 2012-2021 when the quote statistic refers to the period 2019-2022? Because they've conflated another statistic from the same report:

The prevalence of melatonin use by U.S. adults quintupled from 0.4% during 1999–2000 to 2.1% during 2017–2018 (1). This rise coincided with a 530% increase in poison center calls for pediatric melatonin exposures during 2012–2021 and a 420% increase in emergency department (ED) visits for unsupervised melatonin ingestion by infants and young children during 2009–2020 (2,3).

It took me about 10 seconds to find the report and verify the stat. It was the first link returned in the search results.

Journalism really is dead.

this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
274 points (97.9% liked)

News

23659 readers
2908 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS