Dangers of Children's Cold Medicine

Parents no longer receive the advice to give their little ones a dropper full of purple grape-flavored cough syrup. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee has recently announced that over-the-counter cough and cold medications are not effective for children age six, and that such medication may even be dangerous for small children. The good news is that common cold symptoms can usually ease with simple home remedies.

Dangers

• Not only does the FDA not recommend cough and cold medicines for small children, it considers them potentially harmful. As an example, a cough and cold medication containing an antihistamine has a sedating effect that could potentially worsen a condition in which a small child has trouble breathing. Additionally, parents often give children multiple medications with overlapping ingredients and cause an accidental overdose. In fact, a cough or cold medicine overdose could be fatal for a small child. As a result, the FDA, in conjunction with the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, has offered to relabel cough and cold medications to say that they should not be given to children under age four.

Older Children

• Although older children are not as likely to have problematic side effects after taking cough and cold medications, problems may still occur. The FDA is still in the process of determining the pros and cons of offering cough and cold medications to older children. The Mayo Clinic urges parents to realize in the meantime that such medications do not cure the cold but simply provide symptomatic relief. Parents must also carefully read the label directions in order to avoid an accidental overdose.

Antibiotics

• Parents might wonder if antibiotics are a safe alternative to cough and cold medications. Antibiotics are not helpful for the common cold, because it is a virus. Antibiotics treat only bacterial infections by killing the offending bacteria. Additionally, antibiotics have their own pitfalls, one being that constant use of them makes a person's body more likely to develop bacteria-resistant infections in the future.

Home Care

• The best way to soothe a young child's cold is to offer soothing care, not medication. Some ways to help keep a child comfortable when he is suffering cold symptoms are: offer him plenty of fluids and use a humidifier to clear out congestion, allow him to get plenty of rest, use saline nasal drops, and (if he is old enough) offer him cough drops or throat lozenges and have him gargle salt water to soothe a sore throat.

Caution

• Most colds resolve themselves in time, but know when to take your child's illness seriously. According to the Mayo clinic, an infant under three months of age is more likely than an older child to develop a serious illness from a cold and so should be seen by a doctor. Additionally, a child may have something more serious if he: is not producing urine as often as usual; has a temperature over 103 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a day or a temperature over 101 degrees for longer than week; is producing yellow eye discharge; is producing green nasal discharge for over two weeks; is coughing for more than a week; has ear pain or sinus pain.