Skip The Cold Meds for Young Kids

A group representing major drug manufacturers announced recently that they will stop manufacturing cold and cough medications for children under 4 years old. This comes a year after these medications were pulled from the shelves for children under age 2.

The FDA is currently considering a recommendation by pediatricians and their own advisory board to ban the use of these medications for children under 6 years old. However, they say that it may take another year before they come to a decision.

The safety and efficacy of cold medications for children has never been tested. When the products became available about 30 years ago, it was thought that children's bodies worked just like small adults and that drug trials in children were not necessary. However, we now know that is not true.

About 7000 children are seen in emergency rooms every year due to overdoses on cold and cough medications. Most of these occur when parents give their child more than one multi-symptom medication at a time. Often, these contain the same medications and even though parents may be giving the recommended dosage of each one, they inadvertantly give too much.

These medications really have no proven effect for young children anyway, but the FDA's concern is that if they are taken off the market, parents will just give adult medication and guess at the dosage, thus increasing the chance of overdoses.

So what do you think? Should these products stay on the market even though they have no proven benefit (and could cause negative side effects)? Or should the FDA ban the sale of cold medications for kids under 6?

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