American Exceptionalism...

...in accidentally harming children by giving them the wrong doses of medicine apparently...

Children’s liquid medicines should only be measured in metric units to avoid overdoses common with teaspoons and tablespoons, U.S. pediatricians say.

Tens of thousands of kids wind up in emergency rooms after unintentional medicine overdoses each year, and the cause is often badly labeled containers or unclear directions, said Dr. Ian Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Children's Hospital and lead author of new metric dosing guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

"Even though we know metric units are safer and more accurate, too many healthcare providers are still writing that prescription using spoon-based dosing," said Paul. "Some parents use household spoons to administer it, which can lead to dangerous mistakes.”

For example, he said, accidentally using a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon would triple the dose.

To avoid errors associated with common kitchen spoons, the guidelines urge that liquid medicines being taken by mouth should be dosed using milliliters (abbreviated as "mL").

Also, prescriptions should include so-called leading zeros, such as 0.5 for a half mL dose, and exclude so-called trailing zeroes, such as 0.50, to reduce the potential for parents to misunderstand the dosing.

While the AAP has been pushing for more accurate dosing of children's medicines since the 1970s, the new guidelines are the most extensive call for metric dosing to date and are intended to reach drug manufacturers, retailers, pharmacists, prescribers and caregivers.

"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," said Paul.

The image above is of course a map of countries that have still not adopted the metric system*.  Those other two countries in red are Liberia (yes, that Liberia) and Myanmar/Burma (yes, that one too).  And the latter announced in 2013 its own planned conversion to metric, which will leave just the US of A and Liberia in this particular little club.

And this of a country that adopted decimal currency in 1792.  To much of the rest of the world, the idea of using an Imperial-based system of measurement is as strange as still using the likes of guineas, florins, crowns, and groats.

A smidgen of history on the US' flirtation with metric:

In 1821, after studying the various units of measurement used by the 22 states, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams determined that the U.S. Customary System was sufficiently uniform and required no changes. Most people thought actually that the metric won’t survive Napoleon’s rule. They were wrong however and by the time the American Civil War ended, most of Europe had turned metric, besides the proud British of course.

In 1866, an act of Congress, signed into law by President Andrew Johnson, made it “lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings.” The act however was merely an act of recognition, which didn’t necessarily translate into practical use.

Following the second WWII, the world officially entered a stage still in expansion: globalization. As America was importing and exporting millions of goods, it found itself in a predicament when trading with other countries, most of whom used metric. American companies had to make twin labels, train workers and students with both systems and re-purpose thousands of machines across various industries. The costs were and still are enormous. With this in mind, some Congressmen proposed the US finally switched to metric. In 1971, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards issued a report titled “A Metric America” recommending that the U.S. transition to the metric system over the course of 10 years. In response, Congress enacted the Metric Conversion Act in 1975 to commence the conversion process. However, these good intentions were extremely poorly applied because someone had the bright idea to strip out the 10-year deadline and make the conversion voluntary. Of course no one wanted to willingly change to metric.

Could it be that due to the size of its economy, the US has made a calculation that it would be more expensive for it to convert than not, unlike the conclusion the rest of the planet has come to ?  Perhaps.  More likely, it's just plain...cussedness.  Or, as it's more commonly explained:

Freedom!

* And yes, of course there are variations & exceptions in the degree of adoption, such as items sold in 'Liters' in the US, and the continuing use of MPH in the UK.