The Woman’s Group OBGYN Suggests Adding Safety to Your Spring Cleaning List Each Year; Your Medicine Cabinet, Refrigerator & Pantry
Springtime cleaning is great for so many reasons. Bringing clarity to our minds and removing the clutter around us can support the feeling of well-being for our whole family. Simply washing up windows, vacuuming carpets, cleaning out closets, and re-organizing some furniture can revitalize our homes and attitudes. Dusting also reduces floating allergens and can also help relieve seasonal sinus pressure from all the flowering plants this time of year.
The Woman’s Group OBGYN in Tampa suggests a few extra safety steps for your family’s health that you may not have thought about.
While spring cleaning your home, don’t forget to take a look at the dates on items in your medicine cabinet, your refrigerator and your pantry. Outdated and improperly marked medicines and foods can be lurking health hazards for you and your family.
Cleaning Out Your Medicine Cabinet
Take the time to review your medicine cabinet items carefully. Identifying, organizing, and disposing of outdated or unused items is the safe thing to do for yourself and your family. Thousands of adverse reactions and deaths occur each year from taking the wrong prescriptions. Especially concerning are children who fall victim to ingesting old medicine when it should have already been discarded and out of the home.
The good news is that the FDA offers safe and local drop locations at most pharmacies to properly discard your unwanted, outdated, and unused medicines at your local pharmacy. Please don’t ‘flush’ unused medicine into the water supply or simply drop your medicine bottles with your name and address in the garbage. Both of these are improper and unsafe for you and your community. While there are a few medications that may be flushed, it’s easier to drop them all to your local pharmacy. You can easily mark out the name and address on bottles and packs with a sharpie and safely drop them off to your grocer pharmacy at your next shopping trip. This is the best plan for an easy, guiltless, worry-free disposal to keep your family, home, and community water supply safe. You can learn more specifics from the FDA here:
Cleaning Out Your Refrigerator and Pantry
Also, from the USDA, we suggest a review of their checklist for your kitchen items. Children and adults (in a hurry) may grab and eat an unsafe food or undercook a compromised product that could cause serious illness. A small bit of the wrong type of bacteria from an outdated stored food item can create terrible stomach pains, cramps, and dehydration at the least. In some serious cases, hospitalization can be required and even worse, certain bad bacteria may be life-threatening for immune compromised adults and small children. Better to simply add your refrigerator and pantry to your spring (and fall) cleaning list to be safe!
All of us at The Woman’s Group Tampa hope you enjoy a healthy, happy, clean and safe home this Spring and always!