Parents are giving their children overdoses of cough syrup to keep them quiet, a study suggests.
Some children taken to accident and emergency wards have been purposely overdosed with cough or cold medicines, doctors warned.
Their study of 189 children who died from medication overdoses showed that in 10% of 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 of the cases the adults clearly intended 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,'
'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,'
'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.' he added.
'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 malicious but were simply overwhelmed and looking for a way to quieten down their charges', Dart said.
December 2008
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Conjoined Twin Faith Dies
