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The WHO statement did not say whether any children in the Marshall Islands or Micronesia had fallen sick.
The WHO statement did not say whether any children in the Marshall Islands or Micronesia had fallen sick.
But it said samples from a batch of imported cough syrup, with the product name Guaifenesin syrup TG syrup, were contaminated with unacceptable amounts of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol, which are toxic to humans when consumed and can prove fatal. The contamination was identified by Australia’s regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
The stated manufacturer of the medicines in the latest alert was India’s QP Pharmachem Ltd, based in Punjab and the marketer of the product was Trillium Pharma, based in India’s Haryana, the WHO said.
Neither QP Pharmachem nor Trillium have provided guarantees to WHO on the safety and quality of these products, the agency said in the statement.
QP Pharmachem’s managing director Sudhir Pathak told Reuters that it had tested a sample from the exported batch following a recent query from the local state drug regulator.
“We found it satisfactory and the regulator found it satisfactory too,” he said.
Pathak also said the product is distributed in India too and the company has not received any complaints so far.
Pathak said QP Pharmachem had permission from the Indian government to export 18,000 bottles of the syrup only to Cambodia. It was unclear how the product ended up in the Marshall Islands and Micronesia.
Trillium Pharma did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The WHO said countries needed to step up surveillance to find more contaminated products.
SOURCE:HINDUSTANTIMES
