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.
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You’re discounting possible allergic reactions.
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Should daycare workers be jailed for feeding kids foods containing soy?
Sorry… you’re comparing soy to melatonin? Also, this was about why kids would be hospitalized, not what people should be jailed for.
LD50.
Which means lethal dose in 50% of a population.
An LD1 dose would be too high.
Yeah no they didn’t need to go to the hospital, as a kid I titrated up to 8 pills at once before I decided it didn’t work.
Having parented a toddler, I can understand the impulse. But you don’t do it.
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So just feeding people melatonin works? I take Quetiapine, which makes the body create some form of melatonin (feels a bit different than mental/body tired).
It works if you take it for its function: to signal the body that night is starting in 1-2 hours, and take it in a small dose (1-2mg). It’s not a sedative, like many seem to assume. It’s best to take it when you start your night routine.
7% of emergency department visits were for kids that took melatonin?
What kind of bull is this?
(Bad reporting or proofreading, 7% of pediatric ingestions)
“During 2012–2021, a total of 260,435 pediatric melatonin ingestions were reported to poison control centers, representing 2.25% of all pediatric ingestions reported during the same period. The majority of ingestions were unintentional (94.3%), involved males aged ≤5 years, occurred in the home (99.0%), and were managed on-site (88.3%) (Table). Most children start (84.4%) were asymptomatic. Among those with reported symptoms, most involved the gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, or central nervous systems. Among 27,795 patients who received care at a health care facility, 19,892 (71.6%) were discharged, 4,097 (14.7%) were hospitalized, and 287 (1.0%) required intensive care. Among all melatonin ingestions, 4,555 (1.6%) resulted in more serious outcomes. Five children required mechanical ventilation, and two died. Both deaths occurred in children aged <2 years (3 months and 13 months) and occurred in the home. One ingestion involved intentional medication misuse; the reason for the other is unknown.”
From the paper they link? But IDK where that 7% came from? 2.25% of pediatric ingestions.
Please quote your source for that info.
You mean the literal paper that the guardian links to in their article?
The article links the wrong paper.
The source of the 7% stat is this report from 2024: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/pdfs/mm7309a5-H.pdf
During 2019–2022, melatonin was implicated in 7% of all ED visits for unsupervised medication exposures by infants and young children.
Interesting. I wonder which is more appropriate, the ten year or more recent two year study.
Additionally, I wonder if there’s any pandemic accounting for the number of parents dosing their kids from having to be at home all day with them.
Thanks for the additional context.
7% of all children hospital visits were for melatonin ingestion? That’s surprisingly high. But I guess real childrearing problems have been mostly done away with so you get weird visits like that when you do.
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.
Daycare is such a roll of the dice if you get some of the best caretakers in the world or some type of scumbag watching your kids.
I know we shouldn’t judge based on looks, but if all the adults at the daycare look like meth heads… Maaaaaybe pick a different daycare.
Finding daycare is a fucking nightmare. Our experience has been:
- Needing to book daycare a year before the baby is born. Think about that for a second…
- Available daycare in run-down shitholes, or places undergoing huge renovations. Nothing like watching a dozen kids sleep on the floor in a freshly painted room because their main room has two labourers building new walls.
- People that are barely in their twenties running entire nurseries, with some people barely out of school that look like they’ve never seen a kid.
- People that run “nurseries” out of a house that could barely house two people, yet expect 30 kids to be cared for there.
- Places with spaces, but news stories about illness outbreaks, prior neglect/abuse, etc.
At this point, I think we’re just going to have to opt for a childminder, because it’s all we can get…
The question is, how a parent can leave their beloved child to people with those faces and expressions?. They should be glad they didn’t put meth in the food…
