Rat poison behind sterilisation deaths, India authorities suspect

Authorities in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh suspect that women who died after attending government-run sterilisation camps over the last week were given antibiotic pills contaminated with zinc phosphide, the chemical used in rat poison, according to a top civil servant.

"The women were displaying symptoms similar to poisoning," said Sonmoni Borah, the divisional commissioner in the district of Bilaspur, where a sterilisation camp was run.

State officials today issued an urgent warning to practitioners across the state to cease distribution of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin “with immediate effect”.

Mr Borah said that zinc phosphide was found to be mixed in tablets of ciprofloxacin that were seized in police raids of Mahawar Pharma, a small pharmaceutical company that was supplying medicine to the state government.

Police had earlier charged the company’s managing director, Ramesh Mahawar, and his son, Sumit, on suspicion of defrauding the government.

Zinc phosphide “was mixed during manufacturing”, Mr Borah said, and a stock of the poisonous chemical was found on the premises of Mahawar Pharma.

Mahawar said that he and his son were innocent. “The situation has been twisted in a wrong manner,” he told reporters, speaking from police custody. “We are just being harassed.”

Sterilisation camp

In the early part of this week, 13 women died after undergoing surgery at a sterilisation camp in an abandoned clinic in the village of Pendari, in the district of Bilaspur. State officials initially said they believed the women had contracted infections because of poor sanitation at the clinic.

But as the week went on, additional seriously ill patients began to surface - first women who had received tubal ligations at a separate sterilisation clinic on Monday, overseen by a different surgeon, and then, more recently, patients who went to a private clinic complaining of flulike symptoms.

In addition to the women who died after being sterilised in Pendari, one woman died after undergoing tubal ligation on Monday.

Two patients, both of them men, died Thursday after receiving prescriptions at a community health centre. The most recent case, a 35-year-old who died late Thursday, had been prescribed ciprofloxacin from the same batch given to the women at the first sterilisation camp, said Dr Ashutosh Tiwari.

Dr Tiwari is the head of Narayani Hospital, where the man died, and said he had provided state health officials with a list of seven people who fell ill after taking ciprofloxacin from the same batch.

In comments to NDTV, a news channel, the chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, said authorities were investigating various theories behind the sterilisation deaths, including the unhygienic condition of the operating room, whether the surgeon had followed safety guidelines and whether the women had been prescribed tainted antibiotics.

“If indeed there was a manufacturing defect and the medicines were toxic, we will find out,” Singh said. “We will act in the strictest possible manner against the officers who gave permission for procurement of the drugs as soon as all the facts are out.”

Relatives of the patients who died after the Saturday sterilisation camp said the patients became ill around six hours after undergoing the surgery, with abdominal cramps, vomiting, dizziness and chest pain. Mr Borah said laboratory tests were being performed on the remains of the 13 women who had died.

New York Times