[ad_1]
TThe first thing that all British children will taste, after milk, will almost certainly be Calpol. The NHS advises parents to give liquid paracetamol to their babies after vaccinations, which begin at the age of eight weeks. According to the UK drug regulatory body, 84% of babies will have Calpol by the time they reach the recommended weaning age of six months.
Calpol is just one brand of liquid paracetamol – but the sweet, viscous, strawberry-flavored syrup in the purple box is as much a part of childcare as diapers, wipes, dummies and baby bottles. Babies learn to recognize this syringe well before knowing how to use a spoon and they anticipate it: their sticky fingers manage to put it further in their mouths.
The NHS web page explaining how to administer a medicine to a child uses the image of the baby suckling with a graduated syringe with a well-known purple plunger. More than five tons of Calpol are sold each day – and over 12 million units a year. Other brands cost half the price, but Calpol owns 70% of the market for pain medications for children, three times more than its nearest competitor and 50 times more than the next paracetamol brand. For British parents, Calpol is the drug of choice.
This medicine is found in bedrooms, bathrooms, nurseries and nurseries. Kitchen drawers across the country are littered with used Calpol syringes. There are more than 12,000 search results for Calpol on the UK Mumsnet website discussion boards. But the more Calpol becomes synonymous with parenthood, the more omnipresence begins to worry.
In the past decade or so, a wave of panic has hit Calpol. Could this be behind the explosion of childhood asthma? Could its characteristic dyes and aromas be the mysterious cause of the ADHD epidemic? Concerns about Calpol's so-called sedative properties have filled the pages of many parenting forums.
Last year, a BBC documentary on overworked children sparked a new wave of panic. After reporting that children swallowed three times more drugs than 40 years ago, the filmmakers interviewed a family doctor whose brief remarks filled the pages of the tabloids and sofas of daytime television for much of the day. week. "We now have children who are almost dependent on paracetamol, Calpol," said the GP. "Some people describe him as the heroine of childhood."
Like all paracetamol-based products, Calpol relieves pain and decreases fever, but we give it to babies too young to tell us what's wrong with them in the hope that it will soothe them. For many, Calpol is a panacea, a cure for crying baby, a reliable way to adjust your child and send him to sleep. At a time when we are forced to recognize the dangers of so many everyday items, from plastics to bacon to toilet seats, we are concerned that the omnipresent solution in the brown glbad bottle has a dark side.
In short, Calpol makes us feel guilty. He became an easy target for anxiety exploited by alarmists and conspiracy theorists. But British parents can not live without it.
TBritish childhood medicine is actually produced in a large factory located in the suburbs of Orleans. Calpol now belongs to an American company, Johnson & Johnson, which has entrusted the manufacture to a French company called Famar. In their marketing, Johnson & Johnson reminds us that Calpol was a solution of choice for generations of British parents. However, the company only acquired the brand in 2006 and does not have much information about its history. They had never given an interview about Calpol: pharmaceutical companies do not really do junkets.
After several months of emails regarding Calpol, they invited me to their British headquarters in Maidenhead, where the receptionists sported the company's colors – white shirts with red scarves – as well as he's sure. 39, acted as air hostesses in a Johnson & Johnson airline.
Johnson & Johnson calls the Calpol family of medicines the Calpol family. "From stuffy noses and sore throats to pain, fevers and teething," says the brand's website, "we have carefully developed a family of effective medications to help you take good care of your little one. "- as if it was a crack team of solutions to almost every health problem that the average child will encounter.
"It's a brand we're very proud of," said Purvi Farahi, marketing manager for Northern Europe. She was sitting with Gill Nelson, Medical Director for Northern Europe, in a white conference room with red chairs; on the other side of the table, a PR consultant was taking notes and recording every word of our conversation. "For more than 50 years, it's a brand with which parents, grandparents and educators have grown. At the heart of it all, I think it's really a matter of trust. "
Calpol brand trust is why people prefer it to cheaper alternatives: parents buy "the overall product experience," Nelson said. "When you have a poor child and you really want to make him feel better, it's not really time to go through the shelves."
Dr. Andrew Green, a Yorkshire general practitioner and clinical and prescribing director of the British Medical Association's General Practitioners Committee, cast a gloomy look at our collective loyalty to the Calpol brand: "In our society, we believe that expensive things are better, "he said. me after my trip to Maidenhead. "Buying the expensive product, which is familiar with the pretty bottle and advertising, means that parents are doing what is best for their child."
Calpol's formula is as essential to its success as its familiarity. "The active ingredient is paracetamol, but the other ingredients – what we call the excipients of the product, all the other elements that are incorporated to make sure that it does not come off in the bottle, have the right consistency, can be extruded into a syringe for dosing, acceptable taste and acceptable appearance for children – all these are unique to Calpol, "said Nelson, skilfully avoiding the words" dye "," preservatives "," flavors " and "sweeteners". Calpol contains 2.2 g of sucrose per 5 ml, which is more than four times more sugar than an equivalent amount of Coca-Cola. No wonder kids do not get tired.
Professor Mahendra Patel, pharmacist and board member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, told me that Calpol's tasty formula made all medications more enjoyable for children. "Calpol is educating this baby to say, actually, I'm going to have this medicine, I will not spit it out. As for the medicines that the child takes afterwards, the seed has been sown and the medicines are not bad. "
Illustration: Ryan Chapman
It is not necessary to go to a pharmacy to buy Calpol: it is sold at gas stations, newsstands, convenience stores and supermarkets. If you can get a pint of milk, you can probably buy a bottle of Calpol next to it. "Availability is really important, especially for a drug of this type where it's often a purchase you make in a very stressful situation," Nelson said. This does not seem entirely true to me: I have never waited for my children to be sick before buying them. Indeed, the NHS website says it's "a good idea" to keep children's paracetamol always stored at home.
Patel has witnessed the power of the brand. He began his career working in densely populated areas of recent migrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. "Families with young children used pharmacy and did not speak the language, but since Calpol was a Calpol, they did not need any translation: they knew it was the solution to many of the minor problems. of their children. "
Nurses who manage vaccination clinics routinely ask parents to give their baby paracetamol to avoid side effects, especially after vaccination for meningitis B, which has a more potent inflammatory response, has been recommended for all children. Infants in 2015. When my baby was immunized last year, the nurse even explicitly told me to "go buy Calpol" to give it to her eventually. This means that many parents who are first approaching medicine with children first meet a health professional who tells them to use it before their child gets sick, by establishing a relationship that tells us that give before we need it.
Under the watchful eye of the UK Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Calpol has succeeded in producing promising marketing messages that promise what all parents want to hear. A recent advertising slogan is "Let the kids be kids" and TV ads highlight how Calpol can "help them get back to a normal life." A Calpol booklet offering a vaccination guide for parents describes a happy baby asleep with arms outstretched and a smile on his face. Sick children do not have a role to play in Calpol's marketing strategy: the messages focus on the more emotional than medical reasons for giving the drug. By focusing on the positive aspects, they give the impression that Calpol can remedy the discomfort felt by your child, for whatever reason.
When I asked Farahi the question, she said that it was intentional. "The strategy for us is always to show the end benefit sought by parents," she said. But their marketing strategy is not just a return to normal: it's about portraying children who have had Calpol happy, or asleep, or both.
Johnson & Johnson hold competitions every few years to find the new face of Calpol – a coveted role in marketing and packaging, comparable to Baby Pears or Gerber. More than 24,000 parents registered their children in the "Be a Calpol Star" contest on the brand's Facebook page in 2011. When Millie Foster, 2, became "The Calpol Kid" in 2006, her face appeared. on the mother, Georgina, was ecstatic. "Everyone will have it in their closets now. Her grandmother and grandfather are very proud, "Georgina told her local Surrey Comet newspaper, adding that Millie" does not like her picture at all. "
Nelson said the main task of their marketing was awareness. "Something like 41% of babies are born to parents for the first time. At each birth, new potential customers arrive on the scene. "
IIn the 18th and 19th centuries, mothers coated their paregoric gum – a waxy tincture containing opium – to soothe their teething pains. Until the mid-twentieth century, it was common to do the same with whiskey or brandy, and we regularly gave the "drop of water" containing alcohol, sugar, dill extract and baking soda to treat colic. In the 1950s, Gould's Grip's Water was announced with a slogan "More Baby Trouble".
Although paracetamol is the most widely used drug in pediatrics, no one is completely sure of its effectiveness. We know that it inhibits an enzyme involved in the production of prostaglandins, making the body less conscious of pain, but the mechanism by which it acts on the brain to reduce fever is less well understood. We know the inputs and outputs, but it's a black box.
Paracetamol was discovered after an error at the University of Strasbourg in the 1880s. Professor Adolf Kussmaul experimented with naphthalene, the main ingredient of mothballs, as a possible remedy against intestinal parasites. Instead, patients were accidentally given acetanilide. Although this is not very beneficial for worms, it has greatly reduced fever. Acetanilide was cheap and effective, but it also deactivated some of the hemoglobin in red blood cells, with potentially life-threatening results. Paracetamol, a derivative of acetanilide, was first used in 1893 by the German pharmacologist Joseph von Mering, in its clinical trials, but fears persisted as to its dangerousness. This is only after a series of studies conducted in the 1940s showed that the paracetamol effect on hemoglobin that it begins to be widely sold.
Calpol was launched in 1959 by Calmic Limited, based in Crewe. (It is likely that the Calpol brand comes from the contraction of "Calmic" and "paracetamol".) At that time, paracetamol was administered to children in solution and had an extremely bitter taste; Calmic was the first to suspend it in a sweet and flavored syrup. When Calmic was purchased by Wellcome in 1966, aspirin became an badgesic because of its badociation with gastrointestinal bleeding. Wellcome marketed Calpol as "better and safer than aspirin because it is a non-irritating product". At this point, prescription drugs could be the subject of legal publicity until 1978. One of the first commercials printed for Calpol was worded as follows: "Calpol Suspension is a liquid flavored, very pleasant to take with the spoon. As you know, this can be of great help when your child is sick or upset. This gave the parents peace, just like today.
Calpol's slogans of the mid-1970s ("Simple Answers to Daily Custody Problems", "Sweet and Comforting, Pleasant Flavor too") positioned it as a medicine: a comfort for your child, a solution for you . A slogan from the late '70s, "Pleasant for Baby, Peaceful for You", is the closest the brand has ever explicitly proclaimed: Calpol has the ability to silence crying babies. This sentiment echoed a lively television commercial in the 1980s featuring a grumpy baby and grizzly bear. "Sometimes baby asks for a suspension for his baby Calpol," says the voice-over, as his raging parents stand in front of his crib in his pajamas and pour it into a spoon. "It makes everyone feel better."
In the 1980s, Calpol could be purchased at over-the-counter pharmacies. It has become one of Wellcome's best-selling products in the UK, with more than one million bottles sold over-the-counter in 1983. Babies have started receiving Calpol after vaccinations. Calpol was now such a natural part of British parenthood that it was marketed as something you take in your suitcase when you go abroad. "When the family goes on vacation, do not take the risk of pain," reads in a printed advertisement of the 1980s, next to the drawing of a feverish child on a beach. The discomfort had become something of a "concerned parent" who should not want to risk.
When British parents started worrying about sugar and additives, Calpol without sugar was launched in 1988 and a colorless version arrived a few years later. When we became obsessed with convenience 24 hours a day in the late 1990s, Calpol went from being a drug-only drug to being sold in all stores. Since acquiring the brand in 2006, Johnson & Johnson has expanded the Calpol "family" by launching a sugar-free, colorless version in 2011, and adding a saline nasal spray and a plug-in vaporizer that releases chamomile and lavender essential oils supposed to help sleep; After all, it's a brand that parents have long badociated with sleeping children.
Illustration: Ryan Chapman
The link between Calpol and sleep has been discussed in many of Mumsnet's sons since the launch of the site in 2000. In one of his publications titled "Dose on Calpol – feeling guilty," a mother tortures herself for administering to his six-month-old son a dose only to drop. Other parents intervene to rebadure her. "Calpol will not send him to sleep. he was visibly uncomfortable with the pain / tension somewhere, and the calpol worked, "says one. "I just badumed it was mildly sedative," replies the mother. "I guess you can not use it forever, so where do you draw the line?"
In 2007, Johnson & Johnson launched a new product: Calpol Night, aimed at children aged two years and older, with added antihistamine, to explicitly help sleep. But in 2009, the MHRA decided that 36 different medications, including Calpol Night, should no longer be given to children under six years of age: studies have shown that their use in younger children was limited and that they were not available. they were related to side effects such as sleep disturbances and hallucinations. . Although Johnson & Johnson could have continued to market it for older children, Calpol Night was quietly retired in 2010.
Doing your best for your children today means never allowing them to suffer. But the generation of parents who refuse more and more to let their children cry at night are the very ones who are willing to dose them with a bottle of paracetamol and antihistamines to make them sleep.
Pthe number of medications on ADHD has doubled in the last decade and the number of adult child sleeping pills has increased tenfold over the same period. But since Calpol is an ubiquitous part of daily parenting, every concern about children's medicines seems to be projected onto Calpol.
Calpol's fame is so great that she was even drawn into the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. The Portuguese police were under pressure to find new information, and their attention was briefly turned to the point of to find out if Madeleine's parents, doctors accidentally killed her trying to calm her down. The leaks from the survey appeared in a Portuguese newspaper, claiming that an oral dosing syringe had been found in their vacation apartment. The McCanns readily admitted to occasionally giving their children to Calpol, but firmly denied any stronger administration. There was absolutely no basis for this theory, which was completely discredited. But Calpol's detail was grasped by conspiracy theorists and the tabloids: the badociation of the most famous missing child of the country and the medicine of our most beloved children was too sensational to resist, even though researches them more fundamental would show that Calpol does not contain any sedative ingredients at all.
Many of the panics that followed were similarly free of fact. "Babies who receive Calpol once a month only" are five times more likely to develop asthma, ", titled The Daily Mail in 2013. The Mail was only one of many newspapers to dramatically announce the results of a study involving 20,000 Spanish children: Calpol is not even sold in Spain; The study measured the use of paracetamol alongside asthma symptoms, but did not find a causal link. The NHS has issued a reply refuting the news, but history is repeating itself in the newspapers today.
When a campaign group called later that year to remove food coloring related to hyperactivity of children's medicines – all children's medicines – the press referred to Calpol's purple signature: the title in the Times indicated "Hyperactivity and Additives Link to Calpol". Johnson & Johnson said in an email that they were using dyes – including "Sunset Yellow" and "Carmoisine", which were related to hyperactivity, though with doses much higher than those found in Calpol – "to make the drug more visually appealing." poor children who might otherwise refuse the dose, "adding that" the majority of children will not feel any detrimental effect of consuming the minute amounts of Calpol dyes ". Of course, you can simply buy the colorless version – but the original purple formula remains the bestseller.
But it is the casual remark of the general practitioner that Calpol is "the heroine of childhood" that caused the biggest flop in the British tabloids. In 2018, a BBC series The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs investigated whether we overload our children. The presenter, Dr. Chris Van Tulleken, vaccinated his granddaughter and then interviewed his family doctor. "We now have children who are almost dependent on paracetamol, Calpol. I do not think that they are addicted to the drug itself, but they are dependent on the process, "said the GP. "Some people describe him as the heroine of childhood."
The Calpol-junkie baby's image was too powerful to leave room for nuance. Parents left angry messages on Calpol's Facebook page after the broadcast. "My children are now teenagers, but I've learned things tonight that I had never questioned before: I feel that I have been misinformed during their formative years," he said. 'one of the two. "Everyone working for this organization needs more integrity," said another, "talking like a worried mother."
But Chris Steele, Resident Physician at ITV's This Morning Program, has released a strong on-air brand defense. "Every parent will be grateful for Calpol paracetamol syrup," he said. "It's not addictive. However, I think parents are psychologically dependent on Calpol, because when their children are sick, they go for Calpol. Well, everything is fine, as long as you follow the recommended dosage. It's totally safe. "
Calpol is very safe if it is administered according to the instructions on the package. (The only real danger is an accidental overdose, and they are very rare.) But our reliance on it makes us feel uncomfortable, which is why alarmist stories refuse to die. As alarmists and marketing departments both know, parental concern is a lucrative task to exploit.
JOhnson & Johnson reject the idea that parents give too much to their Calpol children. "We have no evidence that it is used excessively," Nelson said. Farahi then quoted independent research data: "On average, households buy 1.95, or about two bottles a year of Calpol," she told me. "Usually, there are about 1.75 children in a family, about two." One bottle per child per year does not seem like much, but an average figure includes families of children of all ages and, as you know all parents, Calpol is used more often with babies than with older children.
Just as paracetamol is a black box, so are babies: they are nonverbal, their internal states are opaque, and we need to determine what is wrong with them when they are upset. "There seems to be a default action to give it to a child in distress, whether or not that child has a temperature or fever," said Dr. Andrew Green. This is happening at the other end of the age spectrum, he said. "When you have an adult with dementia who is in distress, it's a perfectly reasonable therapeutic intervention to try low-risk drugs like paracetamol, because sometimes people can not communicate the pain. I would not want to criticize parents for giving them to children in distress. There are rational reasons for doing it. "
Calpol's packaging says it's for the relief of pain and fever, but we give it for distress, and the brand has always encouraged it in its marketing. There are many reasons why a drug containing no known sedative could make the child calm and sleepy. The most obvious is that it alleviates the pain or physical discomfort caused by the fever that prevented them from sleeping. But it is likely that Calpol's power stems mainly from his ability to comfort the parents.
"One of the things that determines distress in the child is distress in the parent. Kids and babies are extremely talented at catching anxiety, "explained Green, describing how babies at vaccination centers are still more frustrated with the injection when their parents are worried. "It is shocking to have a sick and natural child that they want to help this sick child. Giving medicines to the child is a way to help. Giving Calpol is much more important than just giving a medicine: it is an expression of love that reduces tension. It is almost a placebo effect by proxy: the child benefits from the fact that the parent believes he is doing well. "
We depend on Calpol – but it is the parents, not the children, who are dependent. We understand that a drug can play such a central role in family life. Parents are becoming increasingly fragmented, separated from larger networks of extended families and communities that convey wisdom. When there is a problem with our children, we are as likely to reach Google as to ask a friend. Calpol has entered this vacuum by producing immunization vaccination guides and online tips on teething, earache, colds, flu and many other minor health issues. The Calpol website hosts several informative videos showing groups of moms sharing a tea pot with a general practitioner around a wooden island in the kitchen, comparing notes on how to recognize a fever, flu or new tooth. The site receives over one million visits a year.
But by turning to Calpol every time our child is in distress, we are contributing to an already endemic culture where problems are supposed to be solved by medication. "We can forget, at every stage of our lives, the effective non-drug interventions, the simple things we can do," said Green. "Whenever a general practitioner proceeds to an emergency or overnight surgery, we will bring an embarrbaded mother with a child running around the room laughing. They will say, "I brought him here because he's really sick, but he's getting better." The reason they have improved, is that they are in an interesting environment, car or bus or stroller and cooled a little. "
Johnson & Johnson insiste sur le fait que la gamme élargie Calpol, avec son bouchon nasal pour vaporisateur et vapeur, offre des alternatives non médicamenteuses à ceux qui le souhaitent. Mais il serait peut-être plus utile d’envisager l’inverse: ce n’est pas tant que nous croyons que la réponse au malaise de nos enfants est la drogue, mais que nous ne considérons pas Calpol comme une drogue. Il a infiltré nos vies quotidiennes et la plupart des espaces protégés. Cela fait partie de la résolution des problèmes de nos bébés de la même manière qu’un changement de mannequin, un câlin ou une couche. Beaucoup sont aussi susceptibles d’atteindre Calpol que de bercer leurs bébés quand ils sont très contrariés.
Cela est en partie dû à un marketing intelligent, qui, au fil des décennies, a fait de la marque une «réponse simple», une partie «quotidienne» du fait d'avoir des enfants. Cela provient en partie de son omniprésence – le fait qu’il peut être acheté en même temps que nous achetons notre pain ou que nous remplissions la voiture d’essence. Calpol est devenu la marque de médicaments que nous ne considérons pas comme un médicament, peu importe ce que ses fabricants pourraient imprimer sur leur emballage. C'est le secret de son succès.
• Suivez la longue lecture sur Twitter à @gdnlongread, et inscrivez-vous au long courrier électronique hebdomadaire ici.
[ad_2]
Source link
