A Jacksonville eighth-grader just may have made a scientific breakthrough that can help mankind.

Patrick Shea of Our Saviour School in Jacksonville has come up with an idea to keep people from overdosing on over-the-counter medicine.

Patrick, 14, received a first-place award for his project, Can Summoning a Pharmacist Reduce Over-the-Counter Drug Errors?, at the Illinois Junior Academy of Science Fair at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign earlier this month. The project was also named best in category among the 200 behavioral science projects.

Patrick is the son of Tim and Lana Shea of Jacksonville. The science project involved putting an invisible watermark on over-the-counter medicine bottles.

You would download an [application] called Digimarc, Patrick said. The app finds a watermark in the background of the medicine bottle label and then it links to a video on the Internet. On the video, I put Jacksonville pharmacist Chuck Savage holding the medicine bottle and explaining how to properly use the medicine.

Patrick got the project idea when he was ill. It was then he discovered that the label on medicine he was about to take was difficult to read.

Patrick had a fever and I could not read the dosage directions, his mother said. So I had to scan in the label and enlarge it on my computer monitor. I think thats what piqued his interest in discovering more about improving ways for consumers to take over-the-counter medicine.

When Patrick began his research, he found that deaths caused by over-the-counter drugs exceeded the those attributed to illegal drugs. He spent about three months researching, producing the pharmacist video, giving a survey to fellow students and making a project board.

The survey asked Our Saviours seventh- and eighth-grade students what medicine they would give to a 6-year-old child with a fever and a cough.

The survey gave them three medicines to pick from, Patrick said. They were asked to choose what would be the correct medicine and dosage.

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Our Saviour student earns dose of science success