Does restricting pack size of paracetamol (acetaminophen) reduce suicides?

Abstract

Public health interventions are usually implemented without any attempt to prospectively evaluate them with an experimental research design. Thus the only way to evaluate the outcome of the intervention is to describe what happened before and after its implementation. In a new study published in PLoS Medicine, Morgan et al. have examined the change in deaths attributed to paracetamol (acetaminophen) poisoning in England and Wales in the six years before and after a legislated reduction in the maximum pack size [1].