Police officers inspecting syrup formulas for children at a drug store in Banda Aceh on Oct 24, 2022. - AFP
JAKARTA (The Straits Times/Asia News Network): Indonesia is hoping to procure another 70 vials of an antidote from Singapore to treat children with acute kidney injury (AKI), speed up their recovery and reduce the fatality rate.
In the past two weeks, Indonesia secured a total of 30 vials of fomepizole from Singapore. The drug is used to treat ethylene glycol poisoning.
Twenty vials have already been used for patients at Jakarta’s Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, which led to an improvement in their conditions.
“Another 10 vials set to arrive today will be distributed to state-run hospitals that treat (AKI) patients,” Health Ministry spokesman Mohammad Syahril said on Thursday.
He added: “The fomepizole is given to patients for free as part of the treatment.”
Indonesia also obtained 16 vials of fomepizole injections from Australia and they were distributed to four hospitals in Surabaya in East Java, Padang in West Sumatra, Medan in North Sumatra and Banda Aceh in Aceh.
It is expecting another 200 vials of the medicine from Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda next week.
Fomepizole was used after Indonesian health authorities found that the ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol might be responsible for the significant surge of AKI cases among children and subsequent deaths since August this year.
This came after the news that nearly 70 children in the Gambia died after poisoning by Indian-made cough syrups that contained ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol.
Both chemicals are impurities that appear in polyethylene glycol, a solubility enhancer in syrups for fever, cough and flu. Ingesting even small amounts of ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol can lead to acute kidney failure and death, but fomepizole can prevent or reduce their toxic metabolism.
There have been 269 cases and 157 deaths caused by AKI across 27 provinces in Indonesia so far.
The figures include three new cases since Oct 18 – when health facilities were banned from prescribing medicinal syrups – and another 15 cases in September and early October that were recently reported to the health ministry.
On Monday, the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) said it had identified two drug manufacturers whose medicinal syrups breached the tolerable levels of ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol.
In an update on Thursday, the agency’s chief Penny Lukito said that its joint team with the police is probing the case. She said BPOM had found high concentrations of ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol in the products.
“It is possible that the ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol themselves are used as solubility enhancers. This raises our suspicion about intentionality (of their use), and consequently, the case is being investigated as a crime,” she said.
The BPOM also said it added 65 types of medicinal syrups to a list of 133 items that it has found safe for consumption, having found them free of ethylene glycol and similar substances allegedly linked to AKI in children.
