Manufacturer adulterated chemicals in syrup that killed 200 children

The Indonesian Police reported Monday that a local intermediary falsified and adulterated chemicals intended for industrial use to make them look like they were for pharmaceutical use, resulting in their use in syrups that are suspected to have caused the death by poisoning of more than 200 children in the country. country.

A police spokesman, Pipit Rismanto, said today that the authorities have discovered that the company CV Samudra Chemical sold dietelinglicol and ethylene glycol – the chemicals found in the drugs under suspicion – for industrial use as if it were propylene glycol for pharmaceutical use.

“Perhaps due to price difference or other things, CV Samudra Chemicals changed the packaging, labels and content to make it look like it was Pharmaceutical Grade Propylene Glycol branded as Dow Chemical Pacific Thailand”, affirmed Rismanto today.

The policeman assured that,even if the label says that the components came from Dow, it does not mean that the raw material came from Dow”, a Thai company, but “the method employed by Samudra was to purchase liquids for industrial use from various vendors, the origin of which is unknown”.

Later, they changed the packaging and in principle adulterated the content to send it to distributors, in an intricate network that is still under investigation, although four executives from CV Samudra Chemical and other local partners have already been arrested.

Cases in at least three countries

Indonesia is one of at least three countries, along with The Gambia and Uzbekistan (with at least 70 and 21 deaths, respectively), that have registered unusual deaths of children due to acute kidney failure in recent months after the alleged ingestion of syrups contaminated by said substances, diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol.

These are chemical components that are commonly used as industrial solvents and antifreeze agents, and can be highly toxic to the kidneys and liver.

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged last week to increase alertness throughout the world – after issuing alerts for each case – and urged increased surveillance of products under suspicion, that they would contain high doses of these chemicals.

At the moment, this is the only common characteristic between the syrups identified as possible causes of the deaths of children in the three countries, with the drugs investigated in Gambia and Uzbekistan coming from two Indian pharmaceutical companies (Maiden Pharmaecuticals and Marion Biotech) and the involved in locally produced Indonesia.

Without there having been any conclusive investigation at the moment, attention is now partly focused on whether the pharmaceutical companies behind the indicated syrups were able to receive raw materials from the same suppliers.

In Indonesia, twenty-five families of affected minors have taken the government and seven local pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers to court, in a lawsuit that began on January 17.

Source: EFE