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Health officials sifting through records on antidepressant prescriptions have not yet found answers to their own figures suggesting hundreds of babies have been given the drugs.
They will keep looking today.
Pharmac medical director Dr Peter Moodie, whose drug-buying agency started going through the records yesterday after the figures featured in the Herald, said he had spoken to officials at medicines regulator Medsafe.
"This is a matter for individual doctors and their individual prescribing."
The Pharmac tallies show that in the last financial year, 2425 prescriptions for antidepressants were written for children under 10. This includes 24 for babies aged 1 and nine for those under 1. The figure for all ages under 10 has nearly halved since 2004/5.
United Future MP Judy Turner, who was given the figures in answer to parliamentary questions, said it was frightening that the drugs were being prescribed for babies.
The medicines are not usually given to children younger than 8, and more commonly are not used on those younger than 13. Pharmac officials were surprised when they saw the figures regarding young children and began investigating further.
Dr Moodie reiterated last night that he could not rule out the possibility that some of the prescriptions were for people who were actually older than had been recorded.
This could have happened by a doctor writing the wrong patient National Health Index number on the prescription, or the date of birth could have been entered incorrectly on the NHI.
Pharmac had not yet looked for coding errors in the prescribing data, but would do so, Dr Moodie said.
When asked if it was conceivable that some mothers' prescriptions had been written on scripts authorising medicines for their babies, he said: "Sometimes it might happen [but] the script should be written for the person who it is intended for."
The Ministry of Health said it was working with Pharmac to analyse the data provided by prescribers on antidepressant prescribing.
The ministry said it would share the concerns already raised in the health sector if the drugs were being prescribed to infants and children.
