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In the mid-1960s, Henri Breault was head of pediatrics at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Windsor (Ontario, Canada) and realized that every year the hospital treated about a thousand children who were admitted for poisoning after having accidentally (without child proof cap) ingested drugs that had been left within their reach due to carelessness on the part of their parents.
This sad statistic led the hospital in 1966 to consider creating a poison control center, headed by Dr. Breault, who sought the best way to ensure that children did not have such easy access to drugs.
They started with a campaign to make adults aware of the convenience of not leaving medicine bottles within the reach of children, but it did little good, since that same year the number of children admitted for accidental poisoning was similar.
It was then that Dr. Breault came up with the idea of inventing some kind of safety closure that would be easily opened by adults but impossible for children to open.
A few months later he had managed to develop a stopper that consisted of having to put a little pressure on it while turning it in order to unscrew it, a method of easy opening for any adult but practically impossible to open for children.
After patenting his invention, he presented it to the Ontario College of Pharmacy and this body approved the invention and regulated so that, as a test, from that moment on, all pharmacies in Windsor would dispense medicine bottles with the safety cap (cp) created by Breault and known as ‘Palm N Turn’.
In just one year, the number of cases of child poisoning was reduced by 91%, which is why the measure was extended to the entire province of Ontario and gradually to all of Canada.
In December 1970, a poison prevention law was passed in the United States making it compulsory to use safety caps on all medicines (whether prescription or over-the-counter), as well as on chemical or hazardous products, and from then on the use of safety caps became compulsory in practically every corner of the planet.
It should be noted that since then there has been a great controversy over the use of these child-resistant safety caps (or child proof cap), since some groups criticize that this type of closure makes it difficult for drugs to be opened easily by the elderly or people with some type of disability who need to take medication
Controversies aside, what has been demonstrated is that in the more than forty years since Dr. Henri Breault invented the ‘Palm N Turn’ stopper, the lives of thousands of children who could have died from accidentally swallowing medicines have been saved.