U.S. MILLIONS OFFERED TO ETHIOPIA TO HELP COUNTRY HEAL FROM WAR

By Lisa Vives Global Information Network

An epidemic of kidney disease among children in Africa has been linked to deadly toxins in cough medicine imported from India.

Doctors say they are seeing dozens of children under the age of five with kidney failure - a condition they only saw once or twice a year – while mothers are demanding justice.

Global health officials have connected the recent deaths of more than 70 children from The Gambia to cough medicine made in India. But before the item could be yanked from the shelves, time had to be spent in testing or screening for bottles wrongly labelled “World Health Organization.”

Four medicines manufactured by Maiden Pharmaceuticals’ manufactured in Kundli-Haryana have been identified as containing toxins by the World Health Organization (WHO) which issued a global alert. But the company got a clean bill of health from India’s drugs controller general who said the samples tested were not contaminated with the dangerous compounds.

Regulatory documents reviewed by Reuters showed that Maiden’s manufacturing practices had fallen short at least three times. In one, the company was blacklisted for five years for selling substandard and “spurious” (adulterated) medicine. In another, two drugs manufactured by Maiden were found to miss quality standards. A third incident involved quality violations in drugs sold to Vietnam.

Gambian pediatrician Vivian Muoneke, a graduate of the University of Nigeria, was sure she was seeing an epidemic of child poisoning due to Acute Kidney Injury. It was determined that the cough syrups were contaminated with ethylene glycol (ET) and diethylene glycol (DEG).

The Gambian case appears to be the first documented example of DEG poisoning from imported rather than domestically produced medicines, experts from Gambia and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The tragedy shows the difficulties faced by a poorly resourced country in identifying and removing harmful products, the experts said.

Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest and poorest countries. It has no pharma industry, no means of testing imported drugs, and just over two dozen pharmacists registered for 2.5 million people.

The syrup, manufactured by Maiden Pharmaceuticals, should be held accountable for exporting contaminated medicine, said a Gambian medical committee.

Indian officials have rejected their findings, calling the world health body “presumptuous” in blaming the syrups in the deaths of some 300 children.

“The issue is not about proof of causation,” said WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris. The toxins found in the syrups “should never be ingested by human beings.”

“This is of the highest priority for us, to see no more child deaths from something that is so preventable,” Harris said.

There are growing calls for the resignation of Health Minister Dr Ahmadou Lamin Samateh, along with the prosecution of the importers of the drugs into the country.

“Sixty-six is a huge number. So we need justice, because the victims were innocent children,” Mariam Kuyateh, mother of infant Musa said. Four other countries where the same products are for sale are: Cambodia, the Philippines, East Timor and Senegal.

The United States has promised Ethiopia $331 million in humanitarian aid to help heal the war-torn Horn of Africa country. The funds were announced during a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ethiopia last week. The funding will provide life-saving support to those displaced and affected by conflict, drought, and food insecurity in Ethiopia,” he said. But the aid may not be enough to patch up the frayed relations between the two nations. A tweet posted by African Stream, put it succinctly: “Uncle Sam in the guise of Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Ethiopia to heal ties after the US earlier accused Addis Ababa of war crimes in the Tigray conflict and cut trade ties.

“So what’s with the sudden change of tune? Could it have anything to do with the fact that arch-geopolitical rival China has been busy signing trade and development deals with Ethiopia and helping the country upgrade its infrastructure? Looks like someone’s worried they’re losing clout on the continent…”

When Mr. Blinken arrived in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, he was the latest in a parade of Biden administration officials courting the continent amid rising competition for influence with Russia and China, noted the NY Times.

Just a year ago, the two countries were at odds and ends after the U.S. expelled Ethiopia from a regional trade group, citing “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” by the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Such denunciations were not repeated during the meeting Wednesday, however, which focused on “progress in the agreement to cease hostilities.”

This time, Mr. Blinken’s goal was to reset America’s relationship with Ethiopia, a nation of 120 million, headquarters of the African Union and until recently a pillar of American security policy in the region. But the war badly strained that relationship.

Under the new terms of friendship, Mr. Blinken said that Mr. Abiy, along with Tigrayan leaders with whom he also met here, “should be commended” for bringing a halt to the violence, though he cautioned that more work was needed to carry out the agreement.

He also suggested that the U.S. bore some historical responsibility for Ethiopia’s civil strife by remaining silent when abuses were carried out.

“For our part, the U.S. acknowledges (the) human rights violations and repression committed d uring the past few decades, actions which sowed the seeds of future conflict,” in an apparent reference to a period when Ethiopia was a major American counterterrorism partner and its government was run by a Tigrayan-dominated coalition. “We and others were insufficiently vocal about these abuses in the past.”