Cold Meds Send 7,000 U.S. Kids to ER Each Year

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, January 28, 2008; 5:00 PM

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MONDAY, Jan. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Some 7,000 American children under the age of 11 are treated each year in hospital emergency rooms because of problems with cough and cold medications, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday.

"In the majority of cases, these ER visits are due to unsupervised ingestion," said study lead author Dr. Melissa K. Schaefer, of the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

The 7,000 cases are just under 6 percent of emergency room visits from all other medications combined, Schaefer said. "Any medication in the hand of a 3-year-old is a problem," she said. "It is important to focus on this, because these are all preventable emergency department visits."

In the study, released early by the journal Pediatrics and published online Monday, researchers used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance project to analyze emergency department visits due to cough and cold medications in 2004 and 2005.

They found that children aged 2 to 5 years old made up 64 percent of all emergency department visits for adverse reactions to cough and cold medications. Among these youngest children, 80 percent of the problems arose from unsupervised ingestions. Overall, roughly two-thirds of all the children studied wound up in the ER because of unsupervised ingestion.

Most of the children, 93 percent, did not need to be admitted to the hospital. But, one-fourth needed additional treatment to get the medicine out of their system, the researchers reported.

The over-the-counter cough and cold products the researchers reviewed in the study included decongestants, expectorants and antitussives. The products may also have included antihistamines. Labels could include the terms "nasal decongestants," "cough suppressants," "expectorants" and "antihistamines."

Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a public health advisory stating that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines should not be given to infants and children under the age of 2. The safety of these products for children ages 2 to 11 is currently being reviewed by the FDA.