12 June – Button Battery Awareness Day: Protecting Children Together
Today marks Button Battery Awareness Day, an opportunity to raise awareness about the serious and often life-threatening risks of lithium coin battery ingestion in children.
The European Academy of Paediatrics is proud to join this global effort, reinforcing our #PowerSafely campaign in partnership with Duracell.
Every year, thousands of children are hospitalised due to accidental ingestion of button batteries. Once swallowed, these batteries can cause severe internal burns in just two hours. Prevention is crucial.
Through our campaign, we are:
🔹 Promoting education and prevention materials in 15 languages
🔹 Sharing best practices with paediatricians and health care professionals
🔹 Calling for European regulations to:
Mandate child-proof compartments in devices using button batteries
Require child-resistant packaging for all coin batteries sold in Europe
🔹 Advocating for structured data collection on ingestion incidents across Europe
Let’s protect children by powering safely – together.
New ways to test high-risk medical devices.
Manufacturers of medical devices need to test their products before being allowed to market them. Specifically, they require clinical data showing their medical device is safe and efficient. In this context, the EU-funded CORE-MD project will translate expert scientific and clinical evidence on study designs for evaluating high-risk medical devices into advice for EU regulators. The project will propose how new trial designs can contribute and suggest ways to aggregate real-world data from medical device registries.
It will also conduct multidisciplinary workshops to propose a hierarchy of levels of evidence from clinical investigations, as well as educational and training objectives for all stakeholders, to build expertise in regulatory science in Europe. CORE–MD will translate expert scientific and clinical evidence on study designs for evaluating high-risk medical devices into advice for EU regulators, to achieve an appropriate balance between innovation, safety, and effectiveness. A unique collaboration between medical associations, regulatory agencies, notified bodies, academic institutions, patients’ groups, and health technology assessment agencies, will systematically review methodologies for the clinical investigation of high-risk medical devices, recommend how new trial designs can contribute, and advise on methods for aggregating real-world data from medical device registries with experience from clinical practice The consortium is led by the European Society of Cardiology and the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, and involves all 33 specialist medical associations that are members of the Biomedical Alliance in Europe.
