The iron warning on the bottle outran the death counts
US labels call accidental iron overdose a leading cause of fatal poisoning in under-sixes. 195,780 children's iron-vitamin ingestions killed nobody.
What the study found
Every US iron bottle warns of deaths the counts no longer show
The US Food and Drug Administration's iron warning calls accidental overdose a leading cause of fatal poisoning in under-sixes. 195,780 children's iron-vitamin ingestions killed nobody; 60 deaths came from adult preparations. Of 2,708 UK overdoses in 2008 to 2017, none was fatal.
The caveat · Voluntary reports, not a full count
Poison-centre and poisons-service data are voluntary referrals rather than a census, so a count of zero deaths describes the cases that reached them. The UK cohort counts hospital referrals, which would miss a child who died before or too soon after arriving. And the US figures stop in 1998, straddling the 1997 packaging rule without separating out its effect.