Child Safe Packaging Group

www.childsafepackagingroup.com

New International Standard for child resistance

Date of page: Fri 28 Jan 2000 at 9:27pm

A New International Standard for child resistance will soon be published for blister packs intended for pharmaceuticals.

The Child-Safe Packaging Group (CSPG), which consists of the greater part of the UK supply industry for reclosable child resistant packaging, is able to announce that the standards of child resistance demanded for flexible packs for pharmaceuticals, will soon be brought into line with both reclosable pharmaceutical containers; and flexible packs for non-pharmaceuticals.

The CSPG was formed in 1995 and its then objective was to ???Create a level playing field of testing for child resistance for all packs, reclosable and non-reclosable, for pharmaceutical or other products potentially hazardous to children.???

The group has widened its membership and its scope and the CSPG has now adopted the wider objective ???To promote the specification, consideration and success of child resistant packaging for all products where ingestion or other contact could prove seriously distressing to a child???

And child resistant packaging is defined as ???Packaging that is difficult for children to open within a reasonable period but represents no difficulty for adults to use properly.???

This broader objective has allowed manufacturers of flexible packaging who are concerned about child safety to join the group and the first such flexible pack producer has been Pago, a blister pack manufacturer, internationally configured, whose UK headquarters are located in Colchester.
Pago has adopted the child resistant blister pack which was initially sponsored by the CSPG, and is undertaking ongoing development work at its Colchester facility.

In October 1999 the group presented a paper to the United States Closure Manufacturers Association (CMA), at their technical seminar in Chicago, Illinois. And one major piece of feedback to come out of that seminar was that the pharmaceutical companies would, as they increasingly became more globalised, pack products to the ???highest world-wide standard.???

The inference became clear, if the International Standards Organisation (ISO) did not cover the anomaly of child resistant flexible packs for pharmaceuticals then its position would be usurped by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in the USA.

As a result of the paper presented in Chicago Stephen Wilkins of the Child-Safe Packaging Group has been invited back to the US in February 2000 to address the Closure Manufacturers Association again at its annual conference in Sarasota, Florida. Present will be, not only the vast majority of the US pharmaceutical packaging industry, but also members of the United States pharmaceutical industry.

The theme of the paper to be delivered will be ???The progress being made in the UK and the remainder of the European Union towards uniformity of testing for child resistance for pharmaceuticals across all forms of packaging.???

???After all,??? said one of the Chicago delegates when discussing the UK blister pack anomaly, ???when the pharmaceutical industry is manufacturing tablets that probably cost five or six dollars each they are not going to bother about saving half a cent on the pack.???

???I am seeing real progress from where I sit.??? said Ian Parker managing director of Dragon Plastics and founder member of the Child-Safe Packaging Group. ???The UK pharmaceutical industry is crying out for child resistant packaging, and the old nostrum that blister packs can be considered inherently child resistant, which was propagated up until 1995 by the National Pharmaceutical Association, just won???t wash anymore.???

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