paziquantil jelly

I spent Saturday making lurid coloured jelly in order to get the drug paziquantil down the kids. One of the downsides of spending time at the lake is that if you swim in the lake or indeed shower in the water near the lake you are at risk of bilharzia from a parasite called shistosomes that lives in snails. In order to prevent this most people take the appropriate drugs every 6 months as getting tested is quite difficult here. The problem is that the drugs are enormous, they are like horse pills and for someone like myself (medium weight) the dose is 4 tablets. The kids have to have about 1 tablet each. The best way is to have the dose in 2 halves 4 hours apart. Anyway there were lots of suggestions from friends about how to get the kids to take the drugs, crushing them is not a good idea as they taste bitter. One friend suggested making jelly which kids usually swallow and mixing the drugs in, however when I made the jelly the drugs dissolved and made the jelly taste foul. So the doc offered the kids the tablet broken up on a spoon with syrup followed by a swig of orange Fanta – no problem!! We have been battling for months to get our youngest to take pills, by mixing them up in food and after all that she just took it swallowed it and had some Fanta.