The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been advocating for metric measurements for decades, just issued its strongest statement yet in favor of moving away from our current measurement system. In new guidelines published on Monday, the doctors’ group proposed that everyone who comes into contact with children’s medication — including drug manufacturers, pharmacists, doctors, and parents — should all start using milligrams.
“For this to be effective, we need not just the parents and families to make the switch to metric, we need providers and pharmacists too,” Dr. Ian Paul, the lead author of the AAP’s new metric dosing guidelines, told Reuters.
Doctors favor the metric system because they hope it will avert common mistakes that end up hurting kids. Each year, parents make more than 10,000 annual calls to poison centers because their kids have accidentally ingested medication or taken the wrong dosage of their own prescription. More than 70,000 children wind up in the emergency room because of accidental medication overdoses.