Deadly Evidence

Doctors have warned that antihistamine (anti-allergy) drugs may be dangerous for some people--and under some conditions. But the sniffling public, hoping to cure the common cold, has gone right on buying the drugs. Last week there was mounting evidence that the danger was more serious than suspected.

In Portland, Me., 33-year-old Dr. Charles A. Glassmire took the extraordinary step of describing to newspapers how one of his patients, a 65-year-old man in apparent good health, had suddenly died. Glassmire, backed up by an official autopsy, said that the apparent cause of death was an anti-histaminic which he had prescribed to treat his patient's eczema. The autopsy confirmed that the white corpuscle production in the patient's blood had been drastically reduced. Convinced that the anti-histaminic was to blame, Dr. Glassmire publicly urged Portlanders to avoid using the drug without a doctor's prescription. True, the patient was under doctor's care when he died. Nevertheless, said Dr. Glassmire, in future, if administered only on a doctor's orders, anti-histaminics could be accompanied by regular blood counts and discontinued if danger signals appeared.

In Manhattan, the New York County Medical Society's New York Medicine reported that two youngsters had died recently after swallowing anti-histaminic tablets like those now sold without prescription over most U.S. drug counters. A two-year-old surreptitiously consumed 19 anti-histaminic pills, promptly went into convulsions and died 13 hours later in a hospital. Children must be more susceptible than animals, said the publication, for the dose that killed this child was less than that found to be lethal to experimental animals. A 16-month-old child who had four anti-histaminic pills (the maximum adult dose recommended by most anti-histaminic manufacturers) died in the same manner in 15 hours.

Anti-histaminics are recommended for children in some advertising and, like other drugs sold across the counter, are allowed to lie around the house. Since the U.S. Food & Drug Administration authorized prescription-free sale of anti-histamini's four months ago, doctors have argued that people would handle them more carefully if allowed to buy them only on doctor's orders.

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