Name: Child medicine shortages leaves parents, medics desperate
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T15:01:31.042Z
Duration: 3 min 35 s
Description: When children fall ill, the proper medication is often unavailable. Many drugs are not approved for children, forcing pharmacies to improvise, crush tablets, and re-dose medication.

When children fall ill, the proper medication is often unavailable. Many drugs are not approved for children, forcing pharmacies to improvise, crush tablets, and re-dose medication.

A hospital pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany, reports a significant lack of medicines specifically formulated for children, despite having ample supplies for adults. Pharmacists are often required to manually adapt adult medications for pediatric use, a process that is time-consuming and poses challenges for both medical professionals and parents.

The shortage is attributed to the small market for pediatric drugs and the high costs of conducting studies for rare conditions. As a result, children frequently receive modified adult medications, often without sufficient evidence of safety or efficacy for their age group. Digital dosing databases offer some support, but without more research and reliable supplies, parents and pharmacists must continue to improvise dosing solutions.

Child medicine shortages leaves parents, medics desperate

30,000 packs of tablets, suppositories and syrups, 660 individual medications. There's plenty of medicine for adults at this hospital pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany, but almost none of it is made for children. To give medication to a sick child, pharmacist Daniela Burau has to prepare the medicines herself, mostly antibiotics. Everything is produced for adults. We can't use these medicines to treat children. They would be massively overdosed. And the tablets are usually too big for children to ingest. We, and many public pharmacies, solve the problem by crushing tablets to make new capsules or syrups. Modifying a medication into child doses is a time-consuming task for pharmacists like Daniela Burau. But it's even harder for parents. It's difficult for parents to handle. The capsules have to be opened and mixed into a puree or a liquid and then spooned to the child. But if we need to change the dose, it's extremely difficult because we have to make new capsules. We can't just give half a capsule. That doesn't work. Denise Schmidt has a similar experience. Her four-year-old has epilepsy and she has to measure out the medication. I know very little about medicine, but somehow I just have to trust that what we're doing is right. There are these measuring tubes, like syringes, but unfortunately they work very poorly. So, yes, it would be nice if things improved. In paediatrics, the lack of child-appropriate dosages has long been a problem. The director of Darmstadt's children's clinic says the insufficient and unreliable supply of children's medicines is not improving. Paediatrics isn't a big market. Some conditions are rare, which means there's little demand for the medication. So there's naturally little interest in conducting studies, which are expensive, cost a lot of money and take a long time. A limited evidence base and increasingly frequent drug shortages mean that children often have to be given low-dose versions of drugs actually intended for adults. During in-patient care, an estimated 42% to 90% of children and adolescents are treated with medications used outside their approved indications. Nearly 40% of all oral medications are altered before they are administered. That means the drug is chosen specifically for the illness. But for the children of that age, there's no evidence, no studies showing that it's effective and, above all, not harmful. Tools such as this digital database in Germany offer evidence-based dosing for children, are a good first step. But without targeted research and a more reliable supply of children's medicines, pharmacies and parents are often left with only one option, to dose the medication themselves.

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