How parents 'overdose their children on cough medicines to keep them quiet'



Alarm: Some parents knowingly overdose their children with cough and cold remedies, doctors say

Parents are overdosing their children with cough syrup to keep them quiet, a study suggests.



Some children taken to casualty have been purposely overdosed with cough or cold medicines, doctors warned.

Their study of 189 children who died from medication overdoses showed that, in one in 10 cases, the parents knew they were over-treating their child.

'This is a heads up,' said Dr. Richard Dart, director of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver.

In 79 of the cases, an adult gave the child nonprescription medicine, the team reports in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The panel of experts had to agree in each case whether the parents' intended to overdose their child.



In 19 cases the adults clearly meant to help the child, but in 26 cases the intent was not to treat, Dart said.

'They were quite certain in all the cases they decided were intentional,' Dart said.

'We had some cases where the parent poured it into the kid's mouth directly from the bottle,' he added.

Dart said complications from accidental misuse are known and dangerous.

'We aren't trying to say there aren't accidents,' he said.

However, he added: 'I am concerned that we have blinkers on and we don't want to admit that there is a group of parents who all the warnings in the world won't help because they did it knowingly.'

'What we have is a group of adults who want to control the behaviour of children and do it in a variety of ways,' he said



'Sometimes it is physical violence and sometimes it is drugs. They tend to be lower-income, under-educated parents, often with a history of child abuse or violence in the home.



'I think there is a clear population here for us to focus on that are involved in these events.'

Parents should also be aware that some of the adults who gave the medications to the children were day-care providers who probably were not menacing in their actions but simply overwhelmed and looking for a way to quiet down their charges, Dart said.

