Global Courant 2023-04-26 12:39:43
NEW DELHI — Contaminated cough syrup made by an Indian company has been found in the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday, following a spate of infant deaths linked to other syrups in some countries last year.
The WHO statement did not say whether children in the Marshall Islands or Micronesia had become ill.
But it said samples of a batch of imported cough syrup, with the product name Guaifenesin Syrup TG Syrup, were contaminated with unacceptable levels of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol, which are toxic to humans when consumed and can be fatal.
The contamination was identified by the Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
The new warning follows three similar warnings issued last year by WHO about contaminated cough syrups for children.
These syrups, made by various manufacturers in India and Indonesia, have been linked to the deaths of more than 300 children – mostly under the age of 5 – from acute kidney injury in The Gambia, Indonesia and Uzbekistan.
The listed manufacturer of the drugs in the latest alert was India’s QP Pharmachem, based in Punjab; and the seller of the product was Trillium Pharma, based in Haryana, India, the WHO said.
Neither QP Pharmachem nor Trillium has provided guarantees to WHO about the safety and quality of these products, the agency said in the statement.
QP Pharmachem’s general manager, Sudhir Pathak, told Reuters it had tested a sample of the exported batch following a recent demand from the local national drug regulator.
“We found it satisfactory and the regulator also found it satisfactory,” he said.
Mr. Pathak also said that the product is also distributed in India and the company has not received any complaints so far.
He said QP Pharmachem had permission from the Indian government to export 18,000 bottles of syrup to Cambodia alone. How the product ended up in the Marshall Islands and Micronesia is unclear.
