‘Indian cough syrup sent to Iraq contains toxic chemicals’, test shows
Bloomberg News. With this, it becomes the latest in a series of alarming revelations about syrup medicines used by children around the world. According to Valisure LLC, an independent US laboratory, a bottle of Cold Out purchased at a pharmacy in Baghdad in March contains 2.1% ethylene glycol, about 21 times the widely accepted limit.
The compound is lethal to humans in small amounts and played a role in mass child deaths caused by Indian-made cough syrups in Gambia and Uzbekistan last year, the report said. On July 8, Bloomberg shared the test results with the World Health Organization as well as Iraqi and Indian officials. The WHO told Bloomberg that it found Valisure’s test results to be “acceptable" and that it will issue an alert if the Iraqi government confirms the product was sold there.
No public alert or recall has been announced yet. In an interview, Saif al-Bader, a spokesman for Iraq’s health ministry said that the ministry has “strict regulations for the import, sale and distribution of medicines." He declined to answer specific questions about Cold Out. Notably, it’s the fifth time in a year that testing has found an Indian exporter’s drugs to contain excessive levels of ethylene glycol.
In addition to the Gambia and Uzbekistan outbreaks, testing by government laboratories has identified other contaminated products in the Marshall Islands and Liberia, although there were no reported illnesses associated with those drugs. The Cold Out label indicates it was made by Fourrts (India) Pvt. Ltd., a Chennai-based manufacturer that exports medicines to more than 50 countries, including the UK, Germany, and Canada.
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