The Food and Drug Administration is about to revise regulations on over-the-counter children's cough syrup. The FDA's review may even lead to the disappearance of the drugs from store shelves, making them available only via prescription.
The trouble, it seems, is twofold. First, the stuff doesn't work. Second, it may cause some unwanted side effects (which makes me wonder if you can call something a "side effect" if it doesn't actually have a primary effect...). Side effects include hallucinations (cool!), seizures (not cool), trouble breathing (very bad), heart problems (uh oh), and death (very not cool and very bad).
In response to an FDA-panel report back in October 2007, drug companies yanked all cough medicines for kids 2 and under off the shelves. The FDA let the companies keep selling the drugs for children older than that, however, despite the fact that the panel had determined that there was no evidence that the medicines actually worked.
The FDA had declined to stop the sale of the drugs, even though averse reactions to cough medicines led to over 7,000 ER visits, two-thirds of which involved children aged 2-5. The panel agreed that the drugs don't do any good for children age 6-11 either, but a majority of the panel members thought that parents "wouldn't have any good alternatives" (translation: It would be bad if drug companies would stop making money from this worthless and sometimes harmful product).
How were the companies able to push these harmful products for so long? It turns out that the drugs were first put on the market before proper drug testing was the norm, and then got grandfathered in. And then, hey, people were buying hundreds of millions of dollars of them a year, so what was the problem?
What's a worried dad (or mom) to do? Try a teaspoon of buckwheat honey (but not in children under 12 months as it may cause botulism in infants).
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