1y ago

Four US daycare workers charged with spiking children’s food with melatonin

www.theguardian.com

Four New Hampshire daycare employees allegedly spiked children’s food with the sleep supplement melatonin and were arrested on Thursday.

After a six-month investigation, police discovered that children had been furtively dosed with melatonin. Officers arrested the daycare owner, 52-year-old Sally Dreckmann, along with three of her employees: Traci Innie, 51; Kaitlin Filardo and Jessica Foster, who are both 23.

Melatonin is a sleep aid supplement that is sold over the counter. But the long-term impacts of melatonin on children are not widely known.

Furthermore, there have been several reports of children being overdosed with melatonin in recent years. About 7% of emergency department visits between 2012 and 2021 were for children who had accidentally ingested melatonin, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health warning for melatonin use around kids and adolescents, warning against the lack of US Food and Drug Administration oversight for the sleep aid.

93 comments

Having parented a toddler, I can understand the impulse. But you don't do it.
- Having seen a toddler before, I also understand wanting to do it.
  
  Teens are even louder. 😶
- .
  
  I don't know that I would ever use it on a kid, but that wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about the impulse to drug a kid to calm them down. Pretty much every parent has had that thought at one point or another. But it's just a silly fantasy you're not supposed to act on.
  
  FDA guidelines on melatonin say to not give it to a child under 3.
  
  You do know that melatonin can fuck up an adult's circadian rhythm. Long-term use will probably fuckup a child's circadian rhythm more, which can affect a lot of things way down the line.
  Edit/Addendum: though this isn't really the best study, it should still be taken into consideration, especially given how little research has been done https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362935/
  
  No, this is absolutely terrible advice!
  You, as the parent, make sure the child is currently safe, then give yourself a timeout. No joke! It's incredibly difficult to destress with an infant around. The moment you are at all tempted by ideas like dosing your kid, it's time to step away - isolate yourself, recenter, and try a better approach (even if it's the hundreth time).
  Anyway, I've seen multiple statements by qualified professionals about melatonin not being safe for kids. Unless you have sources to back your claim, I completely reject it. That's just the way it works...
  
  Genuine question: Why do you overwrite most of your comments? There's no Karma here like on Reddit, and you can just make an anonymous account.
7% of emergency department visits were for kids that took melatonin?
What kind of bull is this?
(Bad reporting or proofreading, 7% of pediatric ingestions)
- "During 2012–2021, a total of 260,435 pediatric melatonin ingestions were reported to poison control centers, representing 2.25% of all pediatric ingestions reported during the same period. The majority of ingestions were unintentional (94.3%), involved males aged ≤5 years, occurred in the home (99.0%), and were managed on-site (88.3%) (Table). Most children start (84.4%) were asymptomatic. Among those with reported symptoms, most involved the gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, or central nervous systems. Among 27,795 patients who received care at a health care facility, 19,892 (71.6%) were discharged, 4,097 (14.7%) were hospitalized, and 287 (1.0%) required intensive care. Among all melatonin ingestions, 4,555 (1.6%) resulted in more serious outcomes. Five children required mechanical ventilation, and two died. Both deaths occurred in children aged <2 years (3 months and 13 months) and occurred in the home. One ingestion involved intentional medication misuse; the reason for the other is unknown."
  From the paper they link? But IDK where that 7% came from? 2.25% of pediatric ingestions.
  
  Please quote your source for that info.
- Yeah, that seems strangely high. I feel like we'd hear about this much more frequently if it was that common.
  
  It's right in the article ... info from the CDC.
So I wondered what the charges were and the penalties for giving OTC medication to minors without parental consent. It appears that the FDA considers melatonin a food supplement, not a drug. (Disclaimer, this is from 5 minutes searching online, I have no real knowledge beyond that). After reading the article, and lacking any other information, it seems like the investigation was spurred by the melatonin dosing, but the illegal part was operating an unlicensed daycare with more than 3 children in a private home. (Again, I'm very uninformed and guessing/extrapolating)
I'm actually not sure if it's illegal to give melatonin to minors without guardian consent. Unethical certainly, but if it's not a controlled substance or medication regulated by the FDA like OTC meds, is it illegal? There a some state laws prohibiting some supplements being given to minors. For example, NY has outlawed sales of dietary supplements to minors. If the supplement can be proved to harm a child, that's clearly illegal. It looks like there's not enough research to prove that's the case with melatonin though.
If anyone has a better understanding of these things, I'd love to hear it. I'm really curious about this now
- Hiding a supplement in food in order to cause a person to sleep is a battery at common law. Bringing simple assault criminal charges under that legal theory should work fine.
  
  Makes sense. Thank you. I'm aware of what is sometimes a vast gulf between what is right and what is legal. I'm glad to see the principle of battery and the law are aligned in this case
I get wanting to calm down the kids to make your job easier, but have you considered just gagging them and duct-taping them to a chair?
/s obv
- You can simply apply a tourniquet to their necks.
- You're discounting possible allergic reactions.
  
  Should daycare workers be jailed for feeding kids foods containing soy?
- Too much melatonin can cause issues. It can also mess with prescriptions for blood clotting, seizures, birth control, high blood pressure, diabetes and immunosuppressants.
- Fussy parents though they may be, 7% of emergency visits is wildly high. Like... How is it possibly that high?
- LD50.
  Which means lethal dose in 50% of a population.
  An LD1 dose would be too high.
- Yeah no they didn't need to go to the hospital, as a kid I titrated up to 8 pills at once before I decided it didn't work.
Daycare is such a roll of the dice if you get some of the best caretakers in the world or some type of scumbag watching your kids.
- I know we shouldn't judge based on looks, but if all the adults at the daycare look like meth heads... Maaaaaybe pick a different daycare.
  
  Finding daycare is a fucking nightmare. Our experience has been:
  Needing to book daycare a year before the baby is born. Think about that for a second...
  Available daycare in run-down shitholes, or places undergoing huge renovations. Nothing like watching a dozen kids sleep on the floor in a freshly painted room because their main room has two labourers building new walls.
  People that are barely in their twenties running entire nurseries, with some people barely out of school that look like they've never seen a kid.
  People that run "nurseries" out of a house that could barely house two people, yet expect 30 kids to be cared for there.
  Places with spaces, but news stories about illness outbreaks, prior neglect/abuse, etc.
  At this point, I think we're just going to have to opt for a childminder, because it's all we can get...
7% of all children hospital visits were for melatonin ingestion? That's surprisingly high. But I guess real childrearing problems have been mostly done away with so you get weird visits like that when you do.
- It's worth considering that a lot of melatonin is sold as gummies. They're tasty. Little kids finds candy (gummies) and eats a whole bottle. Uh oh.
  I'm sure there is a non-dangerous, or at least not life threatening, dose for most kids. I'd be surprised if one gummy sent a 10yo or similar aged kid to an ER without other extenuating circumstances.
- The article said 7% of all emergency visits (with no qualifier). You said 7% of visits by children which sounds more reasonable. The actual statistic is even more specific than that.
  During 2019–2022, melatonin was implicated in 7% of all ED visits for unsupervised medication exposures by infants and young children.
  - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/pdfs/mm7309a5-H.pdf
  The article links a summary of the wrong CDC report (June 2022) that does not contain this stat. The report that this stat comes from (quoted above) was published in March 2024 by a completely different group of researchers.
  And why did the article say the statistic was for 2012-2021 when the quote statistic refers to the period 2019-2022? Because they've conflated another statistic from the same report:
  The prevalence of melatonin use by U.S. adults quintupled from 0.4% during 1999–2000 to 2.1% during 2017–2018 (1). This rise coincided with a 530% increase in poison center calls for pediatric melatonin exposures during 2012–2021 and a 420% increase in emergency department (ED) visits for unsupervised melatonin ingestion by infants and young children during 2009–2020 (2,3).
  It took me about 10 seconds to find the report and verify the stat. It was the first link returned in the search results.
  Journalism really is dead.
- I found it surprising as well. Maybe parents of young children tend to take melatonin to help them sleep, because parents tend to be sleep deprived?
Manchester, NH and abuse of OTC meds, yeah, that tracks.
Who let the local trailer park run a day care?
Now those are some funny mugshots.
- Could you imagine voluntarily leaving your kids with any one of these people?
So just feeding people melatonin works? I take Quetiapine, which makes the body create some form of melatonin (feels a bit different than mental/body tired).
- It works if you take it for its function: to signal the body that night is starting in 1-2 hours, and take it in a small dose (1-2mg). It’s not a sedative, like many seem to assume. It’s best to take it when you start your night routine.
I read this as melanin and it was even more confusing.
- I can already predict the fox news headline...
The question is, how a parent can leave their beloved child to people with those faces and expressions?. They should be glad they didn’t put meth in the food…
- Not every ugly person wants to drug kids.
  
  But these four did.
- You clearly haven’t seen what people charge for daycare. Some people have no choice, this is the problem in this country. Not everyone can drop more than their mortgage on daycare.
  
  There are ALWYS options when kids are involved . I’m not rich I’m a common worker, and I would make the imposible to avoid leaving my child there.
- I'm confused. Are you implying that they should have gotten the kids stoned?
  
  Even if it had no longer-term health effects on a child's developing body (and I'm not convinced of that at all), it just seems like a bad plan considering kids already eat too much, get paranoid and make bad decisions.
- This is some world class gymnastics to make this article relevant to a (completely unrelated) topic that matters to you
- You're making us sane marijuana advocates look bad.

93 comments