Indian State Recalls Pills Linked to Sterilization Deaths
NEW DELHI — The women who died after sterilization surgery in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh might have been given antibiotic pills contaminated with rat poison, a senior official said on Friday.
Sonmoni Borah, the divisional commissioner in the district of Bilaspur, in Chhattisgarh, said that tablets of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin that were seized in police raids of Mahawar Pharma, a small company supplying medicines to the state government, were found to contain the chemical zinc phosphide.
“If you do a quick Google search, you will find it is rat poison, and the women were displaying symptoms similar to poisoning,” Mr. Borah said in a telephone interview. State officials issued an urgent warning on Friday to practitioners across the state, telling them to stop distributing or using ciprofloxacin “with immediate effect,” he said.
Mr. Borah said supplies of zinc phosphide were found at a pharmaceutical plant, Mahawar Pharma, and that the chemical “was mixed during manufacturing.”
The police arrested the company’s managing director, Ramesh Mahawar, and his son, Sumit, on Friday, and said they were suspected of defrauding the government.
Mr. Mahawar told Reuters that he and his son were innocent. “The situation has been twisted in a wrong manner,” he told the news agency, speaking from police custody. “We are just being harassed.” He said the company had been manufacturing drugs for 35 years and had annual sales of about $130,000.
Twelve women died this week after undergoing tubal ligation procedures last Saturday at a government-run “sterilization camp” in the village of Pendari, in Bilaspur district. The surgery was done in a rushed assembly-line fashion in an abandoned clinic, and afterward the women were given ciprofloxacin pills made by Mahawar Pharma.
State officials initially said they believed the women had contracted infections because of poor sanitation at the clinic. But more patients began to fall seriously ill — first, women who received tubal ligations at a separate sterilization clinic on Monday, overseen by a different surgeon, and, then more recently, patients who were treated for flulike symptoms and had not had surgery.
(More from The New York Times)
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