Indonesia bans cough syrups as 100 children dead of kidney failure | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia bans cough syrups as 100 children dead of kidney failure

scotsman.com

35 pointslatchkey10 comments

>In the Gambia, nearly 70 children died as a result of taking the syrups, prompting the WHO to issue a global alert earlier this month. The Indian authorities and the cough syrup manufacturer, Maiden Pharmaceuticals, said that the products had only been exported to the Gambia.

>The company has been blacklisted by Indian authorities numerous times for quality violations and is among nearly 40 Indian pharmaceutical companies blacklisted by Vietnam for exporting sub-standard products.

>Local media in Indonesia said that market traders were still selling the banned products, saying that buyers “know the risk”.

This sounds like a problem of lack of regulation, along with poverty leading to desperate decisions like buying the cheap cough medicine

You’ll find no shortage of regulation in Indonesia. And no shortage of bribery.

Same as in India once upon a time. Although things have improved significantly. The thing is that every once in a while a scandal like this surfaces, leading to stricter controls and then things go back to square one. The issue is over regulations in developing countries were always one of the primary drivers of corruption and things get really tricky when we deal with industries like Pharma or Health. Poor people simply do not have much options, either consume cheap products or do nothing. I have observed that for a lot of non serious diseases sometimes doing nothing makes financial sense for people inadvertently.

Agreed, in this case doing nothing could be the best option.

>Diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol are toxic to humans when consumed and can prove fatal.
Toxic effects can include abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to pass urine, headache,

altered mental state, and acute kidney injury which may lead to death.

Apparently not just 'cough syrups', but other syrups and liquids are tainted also.

The wikipedia page on glycerol lists quite a few cases of it killing people when contaminated with diethylene glycol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol#Historical_cases_of_c...

Apparently this was a problem as far back as 1937.

Diethylene glycol keeps showing up in poisoning cases. Discussion from a few weeks ago about a different poisoning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014834

TLDR Antifreeze in cough syrups kill

There is quite plausible and obvious explanation as to how it happened:

We need those industrial wats cleaned but we ran out of IPA! No problem Antifreeze is like an alcohol, right?

My guess was a tainted thickening agent, I doubt it was put in maliciously, there was no top hatted man twirling his mustache cackling "haha now we will put anti freeze into our cough syrup and kill the children with it" but more criminal indifference as the batch of glycerin that they got for a really cheap went through a non-existant quality control process that would have found it tainted with the ethylene glycol produced at the same chemical factory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com