Story highlights More than 80% of caregivers made an error when dispensing medicine, experiment showedOral syringes were less likely than cups to lead to dosing mistakes(CNN) A sick child is worry enough, here's one way parents can avoid additional anxiety. Many parents are making dosing errors when giving medicine to their children, a new study suggests , but using a syringe instead of a cup or spoon could prevent many of those errors. Yet, even for this best practices tool -- and certainly for methods such as cups and spoons -- other factors can baffle the worried parents of a sick child. Packaging, labeling and dosing information, for example, are not standardized. "A range of measurement units (eg, milliliter, teaspoon, tablespoon), along with their associated abbreviations, are used as part of instructions on labels and dosing tools, contributing to confusion and multifold errors," wrote Yin and her co-authors.

Source: CNN September 12, 2016 14:26 UTC