Comparative Analysis of Holiday versus Non-Holiday Exposures in Children Under Age Six

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To determine if children ≤5 years of age come in contact with a greater number of harmful exposures, including medications during holidays compared to non-holidays from January 1, 2000- December 31, 2009. METHODS: This is a descriptive, retrospective study of children ≤5 years of age that are exposed to harmful substances. The independent variable will be holidays versus non-holidays. The primary dependent variable will be the number of harmful exposures. There will be two secondary dependent variables. The first being the number of medication exposures and the second will be the number of non-medication exposures. RESULTS: The proportion of total exposures (med and non-med) significantly increased during the period of 2005-2009 compared to 2000-2004 (1.1%, p<0.001). There were significantly fewer exposures on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday compared to the rest of the week (p<0.001). When comparing the number of exposures on holidays versus non-holidays, there were significantly fewer overall exposures for holidays versus non-holidays (p=0.039). Labor Day had significantly higher exposures than control data (p=0.019) while Christmas and New Year's had significantly less exposures than control data (p<0.0001 and p=0.007 respectively). Labor Day was associated with the highest average number of exposures (30.8) and Christmas was associated with the lowest average number of exposures (21.2) when comparing holidays to each other. A statistically significant greater number of exposures were due to non- medication versus medications for both holiday and non-holiday data (<0.001). The total number of exposures was significantly greater for boys (52.8%) versus girls (46.2%, p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Pediatric exposures for the pre-defined holidays are less common when compared to corresponding non-holidays. Interestingly, the same was found for weekends in general where Friday, Saturday, and Sunday yield fewer pediatric exposures than Monday through Thursday. The majority of exposures are due to non-medication sources with all exposures more common in boys than girls.