According to the BBC, a total of $20,000 in compensation was awarded to the families of 70 dead Gambian children, whose deaths were thought to have been caused by ingesting cough syrup imported from India. The settlement amounts to around $285 per victim.
The offer was considered “offensive,” Ebrima Sanyang, the mourning families’ spokesman, told the BBC. He said accepting the cash would imply they were not seeking justice for their children. The families refused the offer.
According to a declaration made by Adama Barrow, the president of Gambia, the West African nation is looking into a string of child fatalities that have happened in recent months.
The nation’s Ministry of Health “detected an extraordinary surge in the number of instances of vomiting as well as diarrhea among children under the age of five,” beginning in July. Many of those kids would later come down with acute kidney injuries, commonly known as AKIs, which threatened their lives.
According to a mid-October report from the Gambian police, preliminary investigations suggest that the deaths are related to the ingestion of four cough syrups produced in India.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is collaborating with the Gambian government in the probe. After discovering that the four cough medications contained “intolerable quantities of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol as contaminants,” a health notice was issued.
According to a WHO statement, diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol ingestion can be lethal. Side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and “acute renal damage, which may be deadly.” The organization identified the producer as Maiden Pharmaceuticals Limited, situated in India.
The four medications Maiden Pharmaceuticals manufactured “are not permitted for manufacturing and sale in India,” according to a statement from the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Still, the business is allowed to make them “for export exclusively.”
Gambian police told the New York Times that although 41,500 of 50,000 bottles of tainted cough syrup had been recalled since October, the remaining bottles are still missing.
India calls itself “the world’s pharmacy” and its drug industry has expanded rapidly, providing medications to the developing world for many illnesses, such as malaria and AIDS, at a fraction of the prices of competitive US and European drugs.
Tijan Jallow, a Gambian official, stated at a press conference on October 31 that the country’s Medicines Control Agency, a national regulatory entity, had not conclusively determined that the cough syrups were the culprit. He noted that the nation is still working to determine what each child took, but the evidence appears to lead to the products from Maiden Pharmaceuticals.
