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.
Having parented a toddler, I can understand the impulse. But you don’t do it.
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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.
Those emergency room visits referenced were almost certainly not necessary and just the result of overly fussy parents (addendum: excluding weird allergic or idiosyncratic reactions to dyes and whatnot). It’ll do really weird things to you circadian rhythm and you’ll have some utterly surreal nightmares, but that’s not anything you can’t manage at home. It’s suuuch a light sleep aid it’s not going to sedate enough to mess with the drive to breathe and your body won’t convert enough of it to serotonin to do that either. It doesn’t really matter how much you take either.
The LD50 (average amount it takes to kill) is over a whole gram per kilogram of body weight in rodents and is basically unestablished in humans. That’s an insanely large amount as far as medication dosing goes, especially since we’re talking by kilogram of body weight. The max established safe dose (no nightmares) that melatonin is routinely sold as is like 10mg total for an adult, so the person would probably need to swallow an entire 100-count bottle for every kilo they weigh. Also I almost guarantee any pediatric overdoses were the gummies (obviously), so they would have to eat a 100-count bottle of the highest dose gummies for each kg. Babies don’t even start eating solid food until around 6 months when they’ll probably weigh around 6kg, so picture an infant getting open and chugging down a half-dozen 100 count bottles. It’s a nonsensical picture.
The daycare workers should still be fired asf though that’s super weird and yeah those kids should be getting regular checkups to make sure this hasn’t messed with their growth or anything.
You’re discounting possible allergic reactions.
Should daycare workers be jailed for feeding kids foods containing soy?
Sorry… you’re comparing soy to melatonin? Also, this was about why kids would be hospitalized, not what people should be jailed for.
LD50.
Which means lethal dose in 50% of a population.
An LD1 dose would be too high.
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…
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…
