The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the cough syrup tragedy that led to the deaths of 24 children in Madhya Pradesh arrested the wife of accused Dr. Praveen Soni, an official said on Tuesday, according to PTI.
Officials stated that Soni’s wife owns the medical store from which the cough syrup was sold to numerous victims.
Dr Soni, based in Chhindwara, was taken into custody last month for alleged negligence after reportedly prescribing the contaminated cough syrup ‘Coldrif’ to many of the affected children who later died of kidney failure. His wife, Jyoti Soni, who is also named in the case, was arrested from their home in Parasia town, Chhindwara district, on Monday night, according to Sub-Divisional Officer of Police and SIT in-charge Jitendra Jaat.
A total of seven individuals have been taken into custody in connection with the incident, the official said. Sresan Pharma’s owner G. Ranganathan, medical representative Satish Verma, chemist K. Maheshwari, wholesaler Rajesh Soni, and medical store pharmacist Sourabh Jain have been arrested.
A total of 24 children in Madhya Pradesh, most of them below five years of age, reportedly died from suspected kidney failure after being given Coldrif cough syrup. At least three children also died after consuming the syrup in neighbouring Rajasthan. It led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to issue an alert against three “substandard” oral cough syrups identified in India, namely Coldrif, Respifresh TR and ReLife.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the child deaths, the Tamil Nadu government cancelled the licence of the cough syrup manufacturing firm, Sresan Pharma. The Tamil Nadu Director of Drugs Control on October 2 discovered Coldrif samples were not of standard quality. Madhya Pradesh officials also said that one sample of Coldrif contained 48.6 per cent of diethylene glycol, a toxic chemical, far surpassing the 0.1 per cent permissible limit as an impurity.
The MP police arrested Dr. Praveen Soni, a medical practitioner, for alleged negligence. After the deaths, the syrup was banned in Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Puducherry, West Bengal and Delhi.
‘Guilty in the case shall not be spared’
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav asserted that “the guilty in the case shall not be spared.” The state government also took disciplinary action by suspending the drug controller and assistant drug controller for their negligence in testing random medicine samples and went on to form a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to carry out a detailed probe into the incident. The Tamil Nadu government sealed Sresan Pharma’s manufacturing facility soon after deaths of children, as part of its crackdown following the tragedy.
