Boston, MA -- A new survey from
NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health
examines the public's views of over-the-counter children's cold and cough
medications in the wake of recent concerns raised by a Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) advisory panel, the media and the pharmaceutical industry
regarding their safety and effectiveness. The poll, Children's OTC Cold Medicines: The Public,
and Parents, Weigh In, was
conducted after an FDA advisory panel recommended that children under the age of
six not be given these medicines. NPR
will report findings from the poll in its coverage of the controversy over using
cold and cough medicines for young children on its morning newsmagazine program
Morning Edition and online at
www.NPR.org.
Reflecting the lack of formal consensus on the issue
among government and outside experts, the survey finds that many parents are
uncertain about whether to use the medicines for their young children in the
future and are talking about the issue with other parents, pediatricians and
pharmacists. One third (34 percent) of
parents with pre-elementary school aged children report that they have at least
temporarily stopped using these medications since the concerns surfaced. Going forward, among parents with children
ages 2 to under 6, 15 percent say they plan to stop using the medications, while
30 percent say they will continue to use them.
Another 28 percent say they have not yet decided what to do, whiles
others either have never used such drugs or were unaware of the recent safety
concerns.
When
it comes to making decisions about the safety and effectiveness of children's
over-the-counter drugs more generally, pediatricians are the most trusted source
for parents with children under age 6, with 71 percent saying they trust them "a
lot" to provide accurate information.
Pharmacists are the next most-trusted, with half of these parents saying
they have confidence in them. In comparison, only 29 percent of these parents
report having a lot of trust in the FDA.
Other issues addressed in the poll include the reasons
why parents report using over-the-counter cold and cough medicines for their
kids; parents' views about the effectiveness of these drugs; whether pharmaceutical companies have
implemented adequate testing procedures for these medications; and how opinions
about drug safety have changed over the past several years. A nationally representative sample of 1,522 adults,
including an oversample of parents with young children, participated in
telephone interviews from Nov. 15-25. The margin of sampling error is plus or
minus 3 percentage points for the full sample, and plus or minus 5 percentage
points for parents with young children.
This
survey is part of a series of projects about health-related issues by NPR, the
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Representatives of the three organizations worked together to develop the survey
questionnaire and to analyze the results, with NPR maintaining editorial control
over its broadcasts on the surveys.
Full results are available
at: http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/pomr121307pkg.cfm