Speaker 1: The World Health Organization is calling from media action to
Speaker 1: protect children from contaminated medicines after a.
Speaker 2: Spate of child deaths linked to cough syrups. Last year,
Speaker 2: Bloomberg investigative correspondent Zachary Miiter and contributors Swati Gupta and
Speaker 2: Modu Jeu looked into the tragic deaths of scores of
Speaker 2: children in Gambia, a small country in western Africa. The
Speaker 2: children had been given tainted cough syrup imported from a
Speaker 2: manufacturer in India. India, of course, is known as a
Speaker 2: leading exporterer of vaccines and generic drugs. Zach in New
Speaker 2: York and Swati in New Delhi joined me to share
Speaker 2: their reporting about a less visible side of the industry
Speaker 2: of trade in cheaply produced medicines, often sold to some
Speaker 2: of the world's poorest countries.
Speaker 3: At what point did someone switch the raw materials, switch
Speaker 3: something poisonous for something totally benign.
Speaker 1: Nobody is thinking about the ultimate consequence.
Speaker 2: I'm West Ksova today on the big take, how poison
Speaker 2: can get into medicine for kids and why India hasn't
Speaker 2: done more to stop it. Zach. This story begins at
Speaker 2: a hospital in Gambia can you tell us what happened.
Speaker 3: So, Gambia is a very small country in Africa, and
Speaker 3: last summer kids started showing up at the hospital they
Speaker 3: are kind of the biggest, best hospital in the country
Speaker 3: with kidney problems. Their kidneys weren't working. This is dozens
Speaker 3: of kids, and what was confusing to doctors at the
Speaker 3: hospital was that even when they gave the kids dialysis
Speaker 3: right away, that should normally mean that they're going to
Speaker 3: make it, but in this case, like every one of
Speaker 3: the kids died and usually there were really small kids
Speaker 3: that were like one to three years.
Speaker 2: Old, and what did they find when they were trying
Speaker 2: to figure out why these kids were done?
Speaker 3: So, some of the doctors at the hospital were aware
Speaker 3: that years earlier in Nigeria there had been a similar
Speaker 3: outbreak of kids showing up with kidney failure and in
Speaker 3: that case the cause was traced to basically syrup medication
Speaker 3: like cough syrup, fever, reducing syrup and stuff that was
Speaker 3: tainted and so pretty much right away, the doctors had
Speaker 3: a theory that maybe this was the cause, so they
Speaker 3: would ask parents when they came into the hospital, what
Speaker 3: medicine did you give your kids? Can you show us
Speaker 3: the bottles, like, they started collecting data on what medicine
Speaker 3: these kids had been taking, you know, before the onset
Speaker 3: of these symptoms.
Speaker 2: And had all of these kids taken the coughs arup
Speaker 2: taking the same sort of medicine.
Speaker 3: It was a little confusing at the time because if
Speaker 3: you think about it, people give cough syrup or a
Speaker 3: set of medicine syrup to their kids kind of all
Speaker 3: the time without really thinking about it, sometimes without a prescription,
Speaker 3: and so you might now remember exactly what you gave
Speaker 3: your kid or when, and so not everybody remembered, and
Speaker 3: not everyone had the bottle still around, so it was
Speaker 3: difficult to kind of collect this data and have it
Speaker 3: be reliable.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Once they collected these bottles, there was a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of different brands and stuff, and they had to get
Speaker 3: them tested, which took time and a lot of waiting around. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: while they're waiting, more and more kids are showing up
Speaker 3: every day. They're in the hospital for a few days,
Speaker 3: and usually they're dead within three or four days. So
Speaker 3: eventually they did get test results back, and the results
Speaker 3: of those tests were crystal clear. They found that some
Speaker 3: of the medicine that was circulating in Gambia was contaminated
Speaker 3: with these toxic substances.
Speaker 2: And so they were able to track these different medicines
Speaker 2: that were causing these children to die to a single source.
Speaker 3: So what they found was that there were four different
Speaker 3: kinds of medication that were circulating in the country that
Speaker 3: all had the same toxic contamination and they were all
Speaker 3: made by one company. So it was just one company's
Speaker 3: medicine that they found was at the root of this problem.
Speaker 2: Swadi. They were able to trace this medication and where
Speaker 2: do they trace it to?
Speaker 1: The World Health Organization connected the contaminated cough syrups to
Speaker 1: a manufacturing a pharmaceutical company in India, which is not
Speaker 1: located very far from the capital in India, Zach.
Speaker 2: How common is it for this sort of investigation happened
Speaker 2: to trace poison medication like this?
Speaker 3: This is the kind of thing the World Health Organization does.
Speaker 3: If a company or a country finds a product that's
Speaker 3: no good, oftentimes that'll lead the WHO to call up
Speaker 3: another country where the product was manufactured and say, hey,
Speaker 3: we've got a problem here, let's look into it. And
Speaker 3: nowadays that trail very often leads back to India. Just
Speaker 3: because India such a major exporter of pharmaceuticals around the world.
Speaker 2: And what did the WHO do in this case?
Speaker 3: So the WHO helped Gambia like actually arrange the testing
Speaker 3: and find labs and do the testing of the cough syrups.
Speaker 3: But then once they knew there was a problem, it
Speaker 3: was WHO that kind of reached out to India and said, hey, guys,
Speaker 3: let's look into this. We've got some bad drugs coming
Speaker 3: from this manufacturer in India. And at the time they
Speaker 3: didn't know maybe these drugs have been exported to a
Speaker 3: bunch of other countries, and so they basically called on
Speaker 3: the Indian authorities to look into it in their country
Speaker 3: and kind of get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 2: What happened next, What did Indian officials do?
Speaker 1: Well, that's exactly when the Indian government started pushing back slowly,
Speaker 1: and then it became more and more aggressive as the
Speaker 1: WHO refused to kind of back down from the allegations
Speaker 1: that they had made. It took two days for the
Speaker 1: Indian drug authorities to raid the pharmaceutical company in question
Speaker 1: and confiscate samples that the company had sent to Gambia,
Speaker 1: and then they took a further three months to test, investigate,
Speaker 1: and finally announce that there was no discrepancy, found that
Speaker 1: the samples that they had collected were clean and the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical company made them. Pharmaceuticals had done nothing wrong.
Speaker 2: Why was there such pushback from government officials.
Speaker 1: Well, the Indian government has generally not been open to criticism,
Speaker 1: and it has become much more difficult to criticize any
Speaker 1: product that comes out of India or any issues that
Speaker 1: crop up in India. There is immagerate pushback. It's difficult
Speaker 1: nowadays to navigate Indian politics and separate the two. In
Speaker 1: politics is now very tightly intertwined with the image that
Speaker 1: India wants. You know, in the global economy, India is
Speaker 1: right now considered as the pharmaceutical capital of the world.
Speaker 1: A lot of money comes into India because it provides
Speaker 1: a lot of generic medication to the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: and one bad batch of medication can smear the image
Speaker 1: that India wants of itself in the world.
Speaker 2: So zach the who other health officials have procedures in
Speaker 2: place when they find medication that may have been tainted.
Speaker 2: But you write that this was an especially big deal
Speaker 2: because this was a case of exported medicine from another country.
Speaker 2: Why is that such a significant thing.
Speaker 3: This kind of contamination, where cough syrup or other kind
Speaker 3: of medicinal syrups get contaminated with these toxic chemicals, has
Speaker 3: happened a bunch of times over the past decades. It
Speaker 3: seems to crop up like every few years. Basically, it's
Speaker 3: happened in like Haiti, Panama, Nigi. As I mentioned, in
Speaker 3: all those previous cases, the drugs weren't imported. They were
Speaker 3: made in Haiti or Panama, and then they were consumed
Speaker 3: there and that's where people died. This was new because
Speaker 3: it was the first time that contaminated drugs had actually
Speaker 3: been exported. It wasn't the first time that any drugs
Speaker 3: that were exported caused problems around the world, but this
Speaker 3: coft serrup contamination, it was the first time that happened
Speaker 3: with that. And this is a really important issue because
Speaker 3: it tends to kill a lot of people when it happens,
Speaker 3: and the people tend to be very small. It usually
Speaker 3: just kills children, and it often kills like dozens of dozens.
Speaker 3: And it's worth pointing out that the WHO is an
Speaker 3: arm of the un like they don't have the power
Speaker 3: to go in to various countries and kind of tell
Speaker 3: them what to do or do the regulator's job for them,
Speaker 3: so they can convene, they can call for meetings, they
Speaker 3: can sort of advise countries and help them with technical
Speaker 3: expertise and maybe kind of behind the scenes, you know,
Speaker 3: nag them to do what they think is right. But
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, it's up to the
Speaker 3: national country regulators to actually do the work of regulating.
Speaker 3: So in this case, you know, the who could call
Speaker 3: up India and say, please get to the bottom of this,
Speaker 3: but they couldn't force them to do it. It was
Speaker 3: really up to India how they would handle this internally
Speaker 3: and how they would deal with this company.
Speaker 2: So why do you talked about how important the pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: industry is to India, How big an industry is it
Speaker 2: for India's academy.
Speaker 1: It does bring in a lot of money into India.
Speaker 1: But essentially what India is looking for right now in
Speaker 1: this current global scenario is soft power. India has steadily
Speaker 1: been gaining value on the global stage. It is now
Speaker 1: being consulted in major decisions that are being taken across
Speaker 1: the world, and the power that India has in providing generic,
Speaker 1: cheap medication in comparison to what developed country like the
Speaker 1: USA would provide. It gives India a lot of soft power.
Speaker 1: So more than the money, it's about the fact that
Speaker 1: India is able to provide cheap pharmaceuticals. And we saw
Speaker 1: that very starkly during COVID nineteen when India started manufacturing
Speaker 1: the COVID vaccines and was responsible for most of the
Speaker 1: vaccinations that went out to developing countries across the world.
Speaker 1: So for India that is immense power. It gives them
Speaker 1: a lot of leverage with organizations like the WHO or
Speaker 1: the United Nations.
Speaker 3: I might mention one other thing, which is that there's
Speaker 3: kind of an ugly history when it comes to raising
Speaker 3: questions about the quality of Indian pharmaceuticals. And we saw
Speaker 3: this probably most starkly in the early two thousands when
Speaker 3: Indian drug makers were saying, we want to make cheap,
Speaker 3: affordable age drugs the first time ever. We're going to
Speaker 3: send them to Africa and save millions of lives. We're
Speaker 3: going to make AIDS drugs for a dollar a day
Speaker 3: when they were costing something like eight thousand dollars a
Speaker 3: year at the time, and Western drug companies weren't having it.
Speaker 3: They were saying, you know, they wanted to protect their
Speaker 3: patents among other things. They said, well, if you buy
Speaker 3: them from India, what's the guarantee they're going to be
Speaker 3: any good. Maybe they're going to be of low quality.
Speaker 3: And so I think from that point on, the Indian
Speaker 3: pharmaceutical community is sort of primed to expect that when
Speaker 3: they hear concerns about quality, especially coming from foreign critics,
Speaker 3: they're going to suspect that maybe that's really just big
Speaker 3: pharma trying to protect its turf, trying to protect its
Speaker 3: patents against cheaper Indian products that are just as good.
Speaker 2: And yet Zach, in this case, they did trace this
Speaker 2: poison back to a single company in India. Can you
Speaker 2: tell us about that company? So, Maiden Pharmaceuticals is a
Speaker 2: family owned company. It's based in the Delhi area. And
Speaker 2: this isn't one of these like giant, publicly traded Indian
Speaker 2: pharmaceutical companies that export a lot of drugs into highly
Speaker 2: regulated markets like the US or the European Union. This
Speaker 2: is more like a company that specializes in sending drugs
Speaker 2: to kind of the least regulated pharma countries. So you know,
Speaker 2: Maiden sends a lot of drugs to Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iraq,
Speaker 2: places where there's not necessarily really high quality drug regulations.
Speaker 2: If you're a small country like Gambia, you might not
Speaker 2: have the resources to send somebody to India to check
Speaker 2: out the factory. You might basically just have to go
Speaker 2: by whatever paperwork the pharmaceutical company gives you saying these
Speaker 2: drugs are okay after the break, What was the poison
Speaker 2: found in these medicines? What did the regulators do when
Speaker 2: they went to this company.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a difference in what they are supposed to
Speaker 1: do and what actually happened, and a lot of it
Speaker 1: is very mulky because new authorities are not releasing a
Speaker 1: lot of information on their investigation. So they are supposed
Speaker 1: to go in and seize all the samples for the
Speaker 1: batches that the WHO has flagged as contaminated, and then
Speaker 1: those samples have to be sent to a government regulated
Speaker 1: lab to be tested and to be seen whether they
Speaker 1: are contaminated as well. The authorities in India did not
Speaker 1: release this information till a few months later, where they
Speaker 1: just gave a clean chit to the company. They refused
Speaker 1: to have any kind of conversation about exactly how many
Speaker 1: samples that they had taken, or how they were processed,
Speaker 1: what exactly was found in those samples. They did not
Speaker 1: release any of that information publicly, Zach.
Speaker 2: The Indian government's claims that Maiden did not have anything
Speaker 2: to do with this contaminated coughs era was not found
Speaker 2: to be persuasive by other people who looked into it.
Speaker 3: Is that right, Yeah, The main point that the Indian
Speaker 3: government kind of rested its case on was that the
Speaker 3: drugs that they tested didn't have any contamination in them.
Speaker 3: But the drugs they tested were not the same as
Speaker 3: the drugs tested in Gambia. They weren't taken from a
Speaker 3: medicine cabinet of a sick kid in Gambia. They were
Speaker 3: taken from the Maiden Pharmaceuticals factory. And drug makers are
Speaker 3: supposed to set aside samples of each batch they make
Speaker 3: in case there's a problem later they need to test it.
Speaker 3: And so those are the samples that the Indian regulators
Speaker 3: seized and tested and said we're fine. So obviously you've
Speaker 3: got to assume that those samples actually really did correspond
Speaker 3: to the drugs that were sent overseas. The other thing
Speaker 3: is that Maiden Pharmaceuticals, the manufact xture, was notified by
Speaker 3: WHO on September twenty ninth that their drugs had failed
Speaker 3: this test in Gambia and they were full of poison.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't until two days later, October first, that
Speaker 3: the Indian regulators actually showed up at their factory and
Speaker 3: seized these samples. So if the Indian regulators wanted to
Speaker 3: be absolutely sure that these samples were really the same
Speaker 3: ones that had been sent to Gambia, they could have
Speaker 3: gone to the factory right away and gotten them. Instead,
Speaker 3: they left a two day window when who knows, somebody
Speaker 3: could have moved things around. We don't know that that happened,
Speaker 3: but the fact that there was this two day delay
Speaker 3: means that the regulators created a window of opportunity there.
Speaker 2: So how do they think this happened? How did this
Speaker 2: poison get into this cough syrup and then get from
Speaker 2: there all the way to Gambia.
Speaker 3: So the official position of the Indian government is that
Speaker 3: these drugs weren't contaminated, but you know, the international consensus
Speaker 3: everybody else's looked at this says they were so to
Speaker 3: your question in how could they have gotten contaminated? If
Speaker 3: you look at similar cases that have happened in the past,
Speaker 3: it's basically always the same. Cause you've got a drug
Speaker 3: that's like a syrup, a liquid formulation, and the active
Speaker 3: ingredient is like a powder. It's like a little bit
Speaker 3: of a set of metaphin which people outside the US
Speaker 3: called paracetamol, or it might be a cough suppressant of
Speaker 3: some kind. And so I for you to just put
Speaker 3: it in some water, the stuff would just settle out,
Speaker 3: it wouldn't mix properly with the liquid, and so you
Speaker 3: need another chemical that's going to dissolve the active ingredient
Speaker 3: in the liquid. And so what drug companies tend to
Speaker 3: use is this substance called propylene glycol, which is like
Speaker 3: totally harmless, clear, tastes a little sweet, It's pretty easy
Speaker 3: to get your hands on. There's a lot of it
Speaker 3: in the world, and you just put some of that
Speaker 3: in there and everything works right. So the problem is
Speaker 3: that propylene glycol. There are some other chemicals that look
Speaker 3: and act just like it. They're called diethylene glycol and
Speaker 3: ethylene glycol. They dissolve the act of ingredients in the
Speaker 3: same way. The only difference really is that they're cheaper
Speaker 3: and that they're deadly poison And so if you look
Speaker 3: at all these kind of historical cases where this kind
Speaker 3: of poisoning has happened, it's because somewhere along the way
Speaker 3: in the supply chain, propylene glycol gets switched out with
Speaker 3: one of these kind of cheaper toxic substitutes.
Speaker 2: Swaty, is this something that can just happen accidentally, where
Speaker 2: you just mistakenly use one for the other.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of checks and measures that are
Speaker 1: built to make sure that this doesn't happen. The companies
Speaker 1: that are making the propelling glacol have to sell it
Speaker 1: in sealed drums, and there is documentation that has to
Speaker 1: be attached with it every step of the way, and
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical company that is buying this propelling glacol has
Speaker 1: to test it. But somewhere along the way from the
Speaker 1: manufacturers of the chemical and by the time it reaches
Speaker 1: a manufacturer of the medicines, there is a little bit
Speaker 1: of switch. Barrels are changed or mislabeled, and people are
Speaker 1: trying to make a profit on the side.
Speaker 2: And Zach, you're writ in the story that in fact,
Speaker 2: there's a whole trade in these barrels that can make
Speaker 2: it look like one chemical is the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Swadi and I met with this chemical trader
Speaker 3: in Delhi who told us that mislabeling is so common
Speaker 3: in the chemical industry that if you're selling like some
Speaker 3: like old used barrels, you can actually get more money
Speaker 3: for them if you leave the labels on, you can
Speaker 3: get a premium. And the reason that they're more valuable
Speaker 3: with the labels on is because somebody might want to
Speaker 3: put something else in there and keep the original labels
Speaker 3: in other words, that they might try to counterfeit, and
Speaker 3: so to make everything kind of more complicated. Propylene glackol
Speaker 3: has all these other uses that don't involve humans consuming them.
Speaker 3: You can use it to make paint, you use it
Speaker 3: to you know, cigar humidors. So as a trader, you
Speaker 3: might think, well, if this is just going in a paint,
Speaker 3: what is anyone going to care? If I switch these chemicals,
Speaker 3: it won't harm anyone. The other thing is that if
Speaker 3: you're mostly a trader who deals in industrial chemicals, you
Speaker 3: might not even be aware that this stuff is actually
Speaker 3: poisonous because it just would never enter into your mind
Speaker 3: that someone would would ever consume it.
Speaker 1: To just add to what Zach said, to check some
Speaker 1: balances that are placed. They have to fail at multiple
Speaker 1: levels for this to happen. The regulators have to drop
Speaker 1: the ball somewhere in the surprise checks that they do
Speaker 1: at the factories, or the company has to not test
Speaker 1: the samples that they are buying off these chemical producers,
Speaker 1: and these guys also have to be unaware of what
Speaker 1: purpose they are selling the chemical for. You have the
Speaker 1: big cheese, and then you have a long list of
Speaker 1: middlemen who are in the supply chain, and then you
Speaker 1: have the ultimate consumer. So why the chemical is moving
Speaker 1: across the list of middlemen. The switch can happen at
Speaker 1: any point. The main manufacturer will not sell to a
Speaker 1: very small farmer company. They sell in bigger quantities. So
Speaker 1: a smaller distributor buys maybe fifty barrels, and then he
Speaker 1: sells about twenty of those to another distributor, and so
Speaker 1: on it goes. So we spoke to one of the middlemen.
Speaker 1: His name is Punkach Mehra. He has a tiny office
Speaker 1: in the basement, and throughout our conversation he was picking
Speaker 1: up his phone every ten to fifteen minutes and selling
Speaker 1: barrels of chemicals over the phone, negotiating rates. It's a
Speaker 1: very tiny picture into this very chaotic manner in which
Speaker 1: chemicals are sold, where one trader is sitting in a
Speaker 1: tiny office somewhere in Deli and he's selling chemicals in
Speaker 1: a state which is five hundred miles away.
Speaker 2: And Zach, what did he say about how the industry works.
Speaker 3: He said, adulteration is a temptation. I mean, he kind
Speaker 3: of ran the numbers in his head. I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: diethylene glac all is about half the price of propylene
Speaker 3: glycol right now, So if you were to put a
Speaker 3: propylene glycol label on a barrel of diatheling glycol, you
Speaker 3: could double your money. Maybe you don't know it's going
Speaker 3: into a product that someone is going to consume. It
Speaker 3: just might not cross your mind that this is a problem.
Speaker 3: So this guy, punkash Mehra, he didn't have anything to
Speaker 3: do with any of these poisoning cases. He says he
Speaker 3: only does business with very legitimate suppliers. He's just he
Speaker 3: understands the business because he's been in it since nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty one, so he knows enough about the business to
Speaker 3: explain kind of what the temptations.
Speaker 2: Are and what does Maiden say about these allegations that
Speaker 2: their coughs are contain this poisonous chemical.
Speaker 1: Midim Pharmaceuticals has largely been silent on this, and they've
Speaker 1: been just waiting on the regulators to allow them to
Speaker 1: reopen their factories. We understood that they have applied for
Speaker 1: authorization to reopen, but the last time I went to
Speaker 1: the factory, they had taken down the signboard and the
Speaker 1: premises were under construction, So we don't know what they're
Speaker 1: planning to do now.
Speaker 3: And I should add they have made some public comments
Speaker 3: since this happened, and they said they followed all the rules,
Speaker 3: they did nothing wrong, and they've kind of floated these
Speaker 3: alternative theories of what might have killed the kids in Gambia,
Speaker 3: like maybe there's a bacterial infection. Nobody else really takes
Speaker 3: those theories seriously.
Speaker 2: When we come back, tainted medicine found in another country
Speaker 2: raises new questions, Twady. Despite this happening, there was still
Speaker 2: another poisoning that happened after it. Can you tell us
Speaker 2: what happened then?
Speaker 1: Sometimes December last year was bakised On also announced that
Speaker 1: it had also traced contaminated cofser up to a pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: company in India. In that case, the authorities moved very
Speaker 1: swiftly and they immediately raided the place. They canceled the
Speaker 1: license of the film.
Speaker 3: It's worth parting out here. You know about twenty kids
Speaker 3: died in the Uzbekistan case, and that manufacturer is also
Speaker 3: based in the Delhi area. So that raised the question
Speaker 3: of like, could the chemicals have had a common source.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that's actually a possibility because the
Speaker 3: chemical dealer that provided some of the raw materials for
Speaker 3: the Uzbekistan drugs was also doing business with the supplier
Speaker 3: that supplied some of the chemicals for the drugs that
Speaker 3: went to the Gambia. And so this one chemical dealer
Speaker 3: seemed to be a key player in the supply chain.
Speaker 3: And Swadi went to that warehouse and.
Speaker 1: I found that the entire warehouse had been borne down.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows what the cause of the fire was. The drums, chemicals,
Speaker 1: everything had melted away, I.
Speaker 2: Should say here. The company the authority shut down told
Speaker 2: Bloomberg in January that it complied with drug making rules
Speaker 2: and was cooperating with authorities. It did not respond to
Speaker 2: subsequent requests for comment, and the company whose warehouse burned
Speaker 2: down it did not reply to Bloomberg's request for comment.
Speaker 3: So, in a situation like this, where the raw materials
Speaker 3: are in question, what the authorities should be doing is
Speaker 3: getting to the bottom of it, tracing the actual origin,
Speaker 3: where was it, At what point did someone switch the
Speaker 3: raw materials, switch something poisonous for something totally benign, and
Speaker 3: then identify where all of this tainted material came from.
Speaker 3: But they only traced it so far and then they
Speaker 3: kind of stopped. And what we heard from the authorities
Speaker 3: we talked to on an anonymous basis was that there
Speaker 3: is no way we could and get into that, Like
Speaker 3: the chemical industry in India is just impossible to regulate,
Speaker 3: and so they just kind of let the trail go cold.
Speaker 2: Swadi, What is the solution here? How can this problem
Speaker 2: start to be fixed?
Speaker 1: Well, the Indian government is not acknowledging that there is
Speaker 1: a widespread problem here. One of the steps that they
Speaker 1: took was to actually mandate that every batch of cough
Speaker 1: syrup that is going out of India needs to be tested.
Speaker 1: Besides that the government has not made any move to
Speaker 1: regulate this market that just rampantly is distributing chemicals Zach.
Speaker 2: In the story, you write that advocates for drug safety
Speaker 2: are skeptical that this is a real solution.
Speaker 3: That's right. There's a bunch of questions about this. It's
Speaker 3: unclear what syrup would actually fall under the new rule,
Speaker 3: because the most poisonous syrup sent to Gambia wasn't actually
Speaker 3: a cough syrup, it was an anti nausea syrup. So
Speaker 3: would that need to be tested under this new rule.
Speaker 3: Nobody seems to know. And you know, the law only
Speaker 3: applies to exports. So one of the recent cases of
Speaker 3: coughs are poisoning happened in India in two thousand, killed
Speaker 3: about a dozen kits. That medicine would not have had
Speaker 3: to be tested under this new law because it only
Speaker 3: applies to exports. So, just on a broader level, if
Speaker 3: you talk to public health advocates who pay attention to
Speaker 3: drug regulation India, they say there needs to be a
Speaker 3: much more comprehensive fix. Whole drug regulatory system needs to
Speaker 3: move from promoting the industry to policing it. There need
Speaker 3: to be more staff and resources for drug inspectors, and
Speaker 3: there needs to be better coordination between the National Drug
Speaker 3: Regulator and the more than thirty local drug regulators in
Speaker 3: the States and territories.
Speaker 2: So have these widely publicized cases hurt business. Are other
Speaker 2: countries now hesitant to import drugs from India?
Speaker 3: Well, Gambia is Gambia just recently passed a rule requiring
Speaker 3: testing of all imports from India. But keep in mind,
Speaker 3: Gambia is a very small country. It's not going to
Speaker 3: make much of a dent in like a fifty billion
Speaker 3: dollar Indian pharmaceutical industry. And beyond that, there's not a
Speaker 3: lot of evidence that this has really impacted enthusiasm for
Speaker 3: Indian medications. On the other hand, there's been kind of
Speaker 3: a drumbeat of bad news this year about Indian drugs,
Speaker 3: not just the cough syrup ex sports, but other kinds
Speaker 3: of medication that have caused problems around the world. And
Speaker 3: so you can imagine if that were to continue, that
Speaker 3: could be a real threat to the Indian pharmaceutical industry
Speaker 3: and its ability to keep growing.
Speaker 2: SWATI, As you continue to cover this story, what are
Speaker 2: you watching for? Where do you think things go from here?
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that somewhere the who is able to convince
Speaker 1: the Indian government of how the pharmaceutical industries are connected
Speaker 1: to the contamination, and at least there is some very
Speaker 1: concrete trap percussions for the companies involved. Once you have that,
Speaker 1: then other companies will be more mindful. I spoke to
Speaker 1: Mehra again a couple of days ago, and he did
Speaker 1: mention that the distributors that he's talking to are talking
Speaker 1: about very very customers. They are trying really hard to
Speaker 1: make sure that the properly inclacole, that the buie is
Speaker 1: legit sweatie.
Speaker 2: Zach, thanks so much for speaking with me, Thanks us,
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