FDAnews Drug Daily Bulletin

Cold Meds May Be Life-Threatening for Babies (Pharmalot)
In his blog, Ed Silverman says a new study reiterates an FDA warning that urges parents to refrain from giving cold and cough medicines to young children.

Raymond Pitetti, associate director of pediatric emergency medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and lead author of the study, says roughly 5 percent of patients under the age of 2 in the emergency ward had OTC cough drugs in their systems.

“Pitetti says his study — in which doctors performed toxicology tests on 274 children at the Pittsburgh hospital between 1997 and 2006 — strongly suggests the cold meds caused the life-threatening events, in which the babies turned red or blue, stopped breathing, passed out or went limp,” Silverman writes. “Although Pitetti says he can’t rule out that something else caused these symptoms, he notes that the ingredients in cold meds can make babies stop breathing.”