Calpol or not Calpol That is the question? Part 1

The season of flu (and fear of swine flu) is upon us. But before you reach for this sticky pink cocktail dished out by doctors and parents as a cure-all for children, think again…

Practically speaking, swine flu is not all that different from seasonal flu in symptoms and treatment. And children aren’t at any particularly increased risk, above that they face from normal flu, but somehow the word ‘swine’ before flu has got parents in a panic – fuelled by the media – and feeling more helpless than ever.

Enter Calpol, uncritically accepted by parents – and bizarrely by doctors too – as a kind of sticky pink magic bullet for whatever ails your child. As far as we at the Ecologist know, Calpol is not a cure for swine flu but you wouldn’t know if from the conversations floating around on parental e-forums:

‘Not much we can do, except keep shovelling in Calpol and keep an eye on them’.

‘I called the doctors and was told to give him Calpol and call back in the morning’.

‘They told us there [at the A&E] to carry on with Calpol, it most likely is swine flu and that we can put the Tamiflu in her strawberry milk’.

No wonder profits are soaring.

In the UK the whole of the children’s medicine category is currently worth £137 million a year and is predicted to grow by more than £20 million in the next five years. This growth is apparently due to a greater emphasis on parents self-selecting over the counter (OTC) medicines to treat children’s minor ailments.

The sickness business

Calpol, the number one selling children’s medicine, has a commanding 70 per cent share of the ‘pain and fever’ sub-market, which accounts for around half of the total children’s medicine market.

This lofty position, according to former manufacturers Pfizer (the medicine is now marketed by McNeil Healthcare UK), is testament to Calpol’s ‘heritage and commitment to meeting the changing needs of twenty-first century parents’.

Or maybe it is just a testament to parent’s general feelings of fear and vulnerability when their kids get sick.

The Calpol range has grown considerably in recent years to include not just the original infant suspension (which contains paracetamol as its active ingredient and is now also available as handy Calpol Infant Suspension Sachets). It now includes Calprofen (with ibuprofen as its active ingredient) as well as Calpol Six Plus Fastmelts (melt in the mouth paracetamol for the over 6s) as well as Calcold (contains paracetamol and diphenhydramine), Calcough Chesty (contains guaifenesin) and Calpol Night (contains paracetamol and diphenhydramine).

Worrying research

So, there’s something for everybody. And if it brings down fever and gives parents a better night’s sleep what’s the harm?

Well, late in 2008 a paper published in the respected medical journal The Lancet challenged many parent’s perceptions of the harmlessness of Calpol. Researchers who analysed data on more than 200,000 children found strong links between their exposure to paracetamol as infants and the development of asthma, eczema and other allergies at age 6-7.

In fact using the drug in the first year of life increased the risk of hay fever and eczema at the age of 6 and 7 by 48 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.

The more paracetamol a child had in the early years of life, the higher the risk. Thus children under 12 months who were given a paracetamol-based medicine at least once a month more than tripled the chances of suffering wheezing attacks by the age of 6 or 7. The researchers noted that increased use of paracetamol – because of earlier fears about giving children aspirin – could be a factor in worrying rise in rates of asthma in many countries.

Fever phobia

The problem is that because it is so widely available, and recommended by everyone for everything, we don’t tend to think of Calpol as medicine. Parents are not encouraged to be thoughtful or frugal in their use of Calpol.

Nor are they encouraged to understand the basic mechanisms of illness with which medicines like paracetamol interfere. In particular parents’ fever phobia is something that urgently needs to be addressed

by Pat Thomas