Most households where kids visit do not safely store guns or household chemicals that can act as deadly poisons, new research shows.

Many people spend time with friends and family over the holidays, and people who do not take extra steps to protect visiting children may be putting them at risk this season, study author Dr. Tamera Coyne-Beasley told AMN Health.

Protecting children from household dangers may be particularly important around the holidays, said the researcher, who is based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Children are going to be even more curious this time of year, because they’re going to be looking for presents,” she pointed out.

“Generally, we always see some kind of poisoning episode over the holidays,” Coyne-Beasley said.

To protect children, people need to make sure their guns are always locked up, and also lock up any household items that can be poisonous, including medicines, cleaning products, gasoline and automobile products, she said.

Accidental injuries - often caused by guns and poisons - remain the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 9. In 2001, close to 100,000 cases of accidental poisoning occurred in children younger than 6.

To investigate how well homes store dangerous items for children, Coyne-Beasley and her colleagues asked 1,003 households where firearms and potential poisons are kept. Six hundred thirty-seven homes either included children or had visitors younger than 6 at least once per year.

The investigators found that 55 percent of homes where children lived did not lock up household chemicals, and one-third of the homes that also had firearms kept them unlocked.

Houses where children only visited were even less secure, Coyne-Beasley and her team report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Among these households, three-quarters did not lock up dangerous chemicals, and more than half of gun owners did not secure firearms away from children’s reach.

“Homes where children live and visit both need to improve their storage practices of firearms and poisons,” Coyne-Beasley noted.

In an interview, the researcher explained that one of the biggest dangers for kids are chemical containers that resemble drinks or food. For instance, some cleaning products look just like bottles of blue Gatorade, while engine cleaner often resembles Hawaiian Punch, Coyne-Beasley said.

Families who want more information about how to keep kids safe from poisons can visit the American Academy of Pediatrics web site, the researcher noted, at http://www.aap.org/healthtopics/safety.cfm.

SOURCE: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, January 2005.