Days after a state-run sterilization camp in India was found to have killed more than a dozen women in a week, an investigation has found that women in the camp and surrounding areas were given an antibiotic that contained a rat poison compound.
Last week, state, national, and international government bodies launched a series of investigations into what happened at the Chhattisgarh sterilization camp, where at one point 83 women were sterilized by one doctor in five hours. At least 60 women were injured at the camp, whose administrators bribed women to be sterilized by offering $23 — two weeks' salary.
While officials blame the on-site medical professionals, one of the doctors arrested over the shocking find said the government's “toxic” medication was at fault for the deaths and injuries.
According to Dr. R.K. Gupta, “the government will never acknowledge they procured toxic medicines, so they'll pin the blame on me.” The government, meanwhile, says that “the medicines administered were spurious and also the equipment used was rusted.” Chhattisgarh's Health Minister Amar Agarwal said the problem was that proper “protocol was not followed. At a glance, it appears that there has been negligence on the part of the doctor.”
The government says that Gupta did not take proper care of his equipment. They say he only cleaned his laparoscope after every five to seven surgeries, not after each one — in violation of medical standards.
Now the horrifying investigation's preliminary testing has found that zinc phosphide, a common compound in rat poison, was given to women in antibiotic form. According to The Daily Mail, the Chhattisgarh health department's principal secretary, Alok Shukla, says that the antibiotic ciproflaxicin was banned from sales after last week's deaths. It was being made at a local factory.
According to Shukla, it wasn't just sterilization patients that were harmed by the medication. “We also received reports that about nine persons, who were not part of the sterilisation operations and had taken the same medicine, manufactured locally, have taken ill with the same symptoms,” he said.
The manufacturer, whose managing director and his son were arrested following the investigation, is Mahawar Pharmeceuticals, officials told Reuters. Mahawar was previously barred from making medications for three months in 2012 because it was making inferior drugs, but it did not lose its license.
More than 1,500 women have died in the last 11 years from the Indian sterilization program, according to government figures, and more than one-third of Indian women have been sterilized. Late last week, the government defended itself against criticism from the media, the United Nations, and Human Rights Watch, saying that it would investigate the camp and its practices.
“If there is anything wrong with the drugs, we will act against the companies, manufacturer, purchaser and the medical team,” said Chhattisgarh's chief minister Raman Singh.
The government has said the nation's sterilization program, which has existed in various forms since the 1970s, is a necessary part of population control efforts. Critics, however, say that women are being sacrificed on the pillar of depopulation. According to Dr. Brian Clowes of Human Life International, “sterilization abuses have been committed in India and Bangladesh since at least 1970. The poor had no voice then, and they have no voice now. Women are usually the victims, but we hear no cries of protest from those who champion ‘reproductive choice.’”
Likewise, the Catholic Church in India has said that the government's population control campaign itself must be ended. Archbishop Prakash Mallavarapu, chairman of the health care commission of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, said, “It is not enough to punish the guilty responsible for this shocking tragedy. The systemic faults behind this tragedy must be exposed and corrected.”
