This drink could kill your child.

As new parents, we constantly worry about what we're feeding our child and most often torture ourselves thinking about if we're feeding them right. We are made to feel guilty for every piece of chocolate or sip of juice we give them.

We try to protect them from everything junk, just for a little longer. What then, can we do, when our child falls sick BECAUSE of something which we think is prescribed by our trusted doctor?
ORS is recommended by the World Health Organisation to help people remain hydrated during diarrhoea. When my 18 month old son fell sick yesterday, I asked for ORS at a medical store in Bangalore, as prescribed by his doctor.
And the guy gave me this ORSL, which is a product of Johnson & Johnson. Since its in a tetra pack, I asked the pharmacist if it was safe for children and he said that it was.
My son was administered with some medicine at the time, which required us to not give him anything for half an hour, so I didn't give the ORS right away. He had puked and hadn't had anything the whole time, so if it was not for the medicine, I'd have given this to him.
After I got back home, I was reading the cover to see if I could refrigerate it and that's when I saw the label that said that it cannot be used for diarrhoea. I got curious and read about it online.
That's when I realized that not only does this not help with diarrhoea, it could actually aggravate the symptoms. This has to do with how concentrated this drink is. The osmolarity of the WHO recommended ORS is 245 mmol/L, whereas the osmolarity of this drink is 585 mmol/L
Basically, this is just juice. Imagine the dangers this drink could pose to a child whose parents think that they are keeping their child hydrated during a bout of diarrhoea when the child is too sick to eat or drink anything.
Did you know that diarrhoea is one of the leading causes of child death in our country? Why would Johnson & Johnson use a name so confusing? Why isn't this removed from our pharmacies? Why are people selling this when we ask them specifically for ORS?
Why are the lives of our children put at such a huge risk?

At 35 bucks a pack, a child's life is only a small price to pay for big business, I guess.

(This happened 4 years ago. Bittu is fine. But this is worth sharing.)

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