Death in a bottle

Toxic cough syrups have once again proven fatal for children. This time, the tragedy has happened in India. Here’s a look at why this sordid tale never seems to let up

- SANKET KOUL

It is a sunny Saturday morning in Northeast Delhi’s Dilshad Garden with a crowd of 15-20 people thronging a pharmacy in the main market. Among those holding up prescriptions are the parents of a six-year-old boy, who is suffering from a bout of cough and cold.

“Bhaiya, yeh syrup sahi toh hai na? (Is this syrup okay?),” asks the mother, to which the pharmacist answers in the affirmative. “A lot of parents have started to ask this question now,” says Mahesh, who works at the pharmacy.

Two weeks have passed since the initial news of children dying due to kidney failure caused by contaminated cough syrups surfaced in Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara district.

As the toll mounted — it is at least 22 now — authorities blamed the presence of high amounts of diethylene glycol (DEG), an industrial solvent, in the cough syrup, sparking a nationwide scare. The toxic syrup, Coldrif, was allegedly manufactured by Tamil Nadu-based Sresan Pharmaceuticals.

DEG is a cheap and colourless industrial chemical most commonly used in making products like brake fluids and paints, a drug inspector with the Delhi Drugs Control Department said.

Coldrif, one of the 19 drugs sampled in Chhindwara, contained 48.6 per cent DEG, which is 480 times the prescribed limit of 0.1 per cent, according to a report by the Tamil Nadu Food Safety and Drug Administration (FDA). Other than Coldrif, two more syrups — Respifresh TR and Relife — manufactured in Gujarat were found to have DEG marginally above the prescribed levels.

“The remaining 16 samples were found to be clean,” sources in the health ministry said.

“DEG is sometimes mistakenly or illegally used by some manufacturers in medicines as a substitute for propylene glycol (a solvent that helps dissolve drugs into liquid form),” the drug inspector quoted above added.