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India sterilisation medicine linked to latest death
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One person has died and six others have been admitted to hospital in India after consuming antibiotic tablets – apparently from the same batch blamed for more than a dozen deaths after sterilisation treatment, hospital officials have said.
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The patients were being treated at the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They came with the medicine strips in their hand … They complained of vomiting, dizziness and swelling in the feet,” said an official at the hospital, in the Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh. It looks like most of the sterilisation patients might be affected due to this medicine.”
The state authorities have arrested the father and son owners of Mahawar Pharma, a small drug-maker in Chhattisgarh, and sealed off their factory after identifying their ciprofloxacin antibiotic tablets as one of several medicines prescribed at the camps. The Mahawars were not available for comment.
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The Times of India newspaper said the pair had denied wrongdoing, saying that if their widely distributed drugs were to blame, more people would have died.
The latest fatality brings the number of people have died after consuming the drugs to 14. Most of the victims were administered the medicine at government-run sterilisation camps. More than 100 people remain in hospital, several in a critical condition.
The new patients did not attend the sterilisation camps and had consumed the drugs separately, the officials said.
The incident has triggered international condemnation of India’s mass sterilisation programme and raised questions over the country’s quality-control standards for drugs procured by state governments.
More women are sterilised in India than anywhere else in the world, and efforts to rein in population growth have been described as the most draconian after China. Indian birth rates have fallen in recent decades, but population growth remains among the world’s fastest.
Sterilisation is popular because it is cheap and effective, and sidesteps cultural resistance and problems with distribution of other types of contraception in rural areas.
