October 18, 2007

See the FDA bureaucrats. See The Concern of The FDA bureaucrats. See The Concern of The FDA Bureaucrats About Safety. See The Concern of The FDA Bureaucrats About The Children. See The Concern of The FDA Bureaucrats About Safety For The Children. See The Concern of The FDA Bureaucrats About Safety For The Children Who Take Cold Medicine.

And see The Concern of The FDA Bureaucrats About Their Budgets. When it comes to Safety and The Children and Safety For The Children, nothing is too much. So we find that today begins a two-day meeting of outside medical experts addressing the crisis of cold medicine for use in kids aged 11 and under.

There is a crisis, isn't there? After all, "an analysis prepared for the meeting by an FDA medical reviewer said cold and cough products aimed at children younger than 6 has been tied to 'serious side effects, including death.'"

Wow. Really? These products have been sold for decades, with unit sales in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions each year. What sort of side effects? How many deaths? What other factors were involved? What are the implications of taking such products off the market: Would no treatment, or various home remedies, be better? Would a ban serve the interests of the kids or the lawyers?

It would seem that decades of experience and the bottom-up choices of millions of parents might provide evidence a teensy weensy more powerful than the opinions of ideologues with axes to grind, bureaucrats with budgets to protect and Congressional wrath to avoid, and newspaper editorial boards with ignorance to peddle. But... it's for The Children. And safety for The Children, a Beltway twofer if ever there was one. And that trumps everything, except the wellbeing of the kids themselves.

Posted by Benjamin Zycher at October 18, 2007 03:14 PM

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