London - A coroner yesterday called on drug companies to make their packaging safer after a three-year-old boy died after swallowing 44 iron tablets intended for his mother. She had just got the tablets from a chemist because she had been told at a post-natal check-up she might be anaemic.
Yaqoob Lookman opened the blister packets containing the ferrous sulphate tablets and swallowed the pills when his parents, Rizvan and Fathima, left him alone for just a few minutes in the kitchen at their home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
The West Yorkshire Coroner, Mr Roger Whittaker, said the iron tablets were dispensed in packages which had "totally inadequate" warnings on them, and urged drug companies to make packaging more difficult for children to open. He recorded a verdict of accidental death.