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The head of pediatric emergencies at the Toulouse University Hospital is sounding the alarm in a forthcoming study: in France, the number of children poisoned with cocaine, even at a young age, is exploding.
A toddler who accidentally uses cocaine could be the storyline for a dark series. It is, however, a less and less rare reality. According to CocaKid, a forthcoming study conducted by Professor Isabelle Claudet, head of pediatric emergencies at Toulouse University Hospital, more and more children, sometimes very young, are coming to the emergency room for cocaine poisoning. A phenomenon whose rise is worrying.
Cases multiplied by 8 in 11 years in France
In her study conducted between 2010 and 2020, Isabelle Claudet identifies dozens of cases of accidental ingestion by children under the age of fifteen which ended in a pediatric emergency department, particularly in Ile-de France and Occitanie.
According to the study, annual admissions have increased eightfold in eleven years, and more than half of the cases have occurred in the last two years. Even in 2020, a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, poisonings continued to increase. That year, the pediatric ER admission rate for this reason was 3.3 per 100,000 admissions compared to 2.8 per 100,000 in 2019. And the ages of the little ones admitted are also frightening:
- 46% of intoxicated children were under 6 years old;
- 16% were between 6 and 13 years old;
- 38% were over 14 years old.
Poisoning causes strong agitation, tachycardia, fever, sometimes convulsions. Small patients are hospitalized in pediatrics or intensive care, 59% with neurological signs and 34% with cardiological symptoms.
More than 60% of their parents are consumers.
“Children are collateral victims of their parents’ addictions. They find cocaine at home which they will inhale or lick, thinking it is sugar or something else”underlines the specialist.
In question, according to her, the increase in the circulation of cocaine in France “purer for a price that has not changed, or even dropped” but also a kind “of uberization in the modes of purchase and delivery which makes it arrive more easily in homes”. As it becomes more democratic, cocaine therefore makes more and more collateral victims.
18 other substances found in children
Even more frightening, the study announces: 66% of the children admitted were not only positive for cocaine, but also for other narcotics. “Either cutting products, adulterants (such as levamisole or lidocaine) or other drugs lying around, a number of children were also positive for cannabis” exhibits Isabelle Claudet on France 3 Regions.
Of the intoxicated children listed in this study, the toxicological analyzes revealed up to 18 other substances in 46 children hospitalized following cocaine intake, mainly adolescents.
Essential prevention for parent consumers
Faced with this public health problem, the Toulouse pediatrician pleads above all for awareness-raising by the health workers of parents known for their addictions, whether in the hotlines of the PMI (Maternal Childhood Protection) or at the level of the doctors who follow the children. ..“It is absolutely necessary to warn parents of the dangers involved”. Because, supposes the author, consumer parents today are far from understanding the risks involved:
“When parents are told that cannabis, which is very commonplace, can put their child into a coma, they don’t expect it to cause such severe symptoms in their children at all. For cocaine, I think that they are also 10,000 places from imagining that it could be dangerous for a small child”.