Children risk death in paracetamol craze
Warning over game of ‘dare’ with common painkiller
SCHOOLCHILDREN are putting their lives at risk in a ‘game’ in which they dare each other to take excessive amounts of paracetamol, police have warned.
The ‘paracetamol challenge’ involves youngsters using social media to cajole each other into consuming potentially lethal painkillers until they become ill.
Schools and police have warned parents to monitor t hei r children’s online activity.
High doses of the medication can cause jaundice, poor coordination and l ow blood sugar levels. An overdose can lead to liver failure and brain damage.
The game is believed to involve children using sites such as Facebook and Instagram to issue the challenges before sharing videos of themselves taking the medication.
It was detected in Scotland by school heads who described it as a ‘dangerous craze’ when one child needed hospital treatment after responding to a challenge.
The dangers of the fad were highlighted by the parents of Charlotte Yousaf, who died four years ago aged 19 following a break-up with her boyfriend.
Despite trying to make herself sick, she died of liver failure in hospital several days after taking the medication.
Her mother Mandy, f r om Halifax, Yorkshire, yesterday warned other children not to ‘end up like my daughter’. She said: ‘Now you see teenagers egging each other on, and it’s a peer pressure thing where they clearly don’t know what they’re doing.’
The paracetamol challenge came to light in March when East Ayrshire Council was told about pupils from a secondary school who had challenged each other. Warning l etters were promptly sent to parents. Local police wrote on Twitter: ‘DON’T get involved in this. It causes liver & kidney failure … and death.’
Alan Ward, head of schools at East Ayrshire Council, said the game was a ‘great concern’.
NHS guidelines stipulate that high doses should not be given to children under the age of 16.
The size of paracetamol packets was restricted in 1998, which was thought to have led to a significant decrease in the number of deaths from poisoning.
Serious paracetamol overdoses occur twice as often in Britain than the rest of Europe, doctors have warned. Paracetamol-linked liver failures, so severe that the patient needs a transplant, happen in the UK eight times more than in Holland, twice as often than in France, and 66 times more than in Italy.