media health scares

It seems that the media are always on the lookout for a health scare to fill out the contents of the evening news or the front page and the latest of these in the last few days is additives in children's medicines. A few years ago it was media scare mongering about the MMR vaccine. The main problem is that often popular reporting of health issues is distorted, sometimes deliberately to produce a good story. The last thing a journalist wants is for viewers or readers to ignore the item and go to do something else. With the latest thing about additives it's not clear if this is just a case of the reporting lacking balance or it there has been deliberate distortion to create an emotive news item. As with the MMR hype the problem with this health scare is that it ignores the problem that the treatment aims to solve. In the case of additives the idea is to make children more likely to take the medicine. If anyone has experienced the bitter taste of adult paracetamol tablets it is easy to undestand why there might be the need to improve the taste of children's medication. Which is more important, for a child to take the medicine or the child to avoid tiny amounts of additive taken on an occasional basis? It seems possible that if there is a push to make medicines additive free then things will resort to Victorian methods of having to use a teaspoon of sugar to help the medicine go down, or else brute force. Being logical about this the whole issue is somewhat contradictory; there is a fuss about children taking tiny amounts of additive on an irregular basis but no one questions the effects of the chemicals that the additive is meant to disguise.