Indonesian company's cough syrup uses ingredients that are 99% toxic

Indonesian pharmaceutical company Afi Farma used ingredients that were up to 99% toxic to produce 70 batches of cough syrup products.

The prosecutors made the finding on October 13 at a court in Kediri, East Java, where Afi Farma is headquartered. Notably, the company's cough syrup products were linked to more than 200 deaths in children in the country last year.

According to Reuters news agency, in court documents, prosecutors said two batches of propylene glycol that Afi Farma ordered from October 2021 to February 2022 and used in the production of cough syrup contained 96-99% of the highly toxic substance ethylene glycol.

According to prosecutor Ikhsan Nasrulloh, tests on Afi Farma's cough medicine products were conducted by police last year.

Afi Farm's representative lawyer, Reza Wendra Prayogo, said that the regulation issued by Indonesia's BPOM Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency in 2018 allows pharmaceutical manufacturers to use test results conducted by raw material suppliers and does not require them to test the toxicity of raw material ingredients.

BPOM has not yet commented on the above information.

Afi Farma is one of four companies accused of supplying tainted cough medicine in an Indonesian police investigation. Their trial is scheduled for October 18.

Late last year, Indonesian authorities revoked Afi Farma's drug manufacturing license as well as the company's products for violating manufacturing regulations.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the safe limit for ethylene glycol is no more than 0.1%. The Indonesian Ministry of Health also applied this limit in its guidelines on drug quality standards issued in 2020.

Ethylene glycol is used as a raw material in the production of polyester fibers and for antifreeze and anticorrosion formulations. If swallowed, this compound can cause poisoning and acute kidney injury.

Not only Indonesia, countries like Gambia and Uzbekistan last year also recorded dozens of cases of children dying from using contaminated cough syrup.

WHO is also working with these countries to investigate the global pharmaceutical supply chain for these cough syrups.