The number of acute kidney injury cases in Indonesia had dropped since the government halted the distribution of syrup-based medicine for children.
"There is a significant decline, from five to eight deaths per day. Now, it (the fatality count) is zero to one case per day," Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin noted here on Wednesday.
As of Wednesday, the number of cases of acute kidney injury (AKI) in the country has reached 325, out of which 178 succumbed to the disease.
Sadikin said it would be in the hands of the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) to take legal action against pharmaceutical firms that produce syrup-based medicine contaminated with ethylene glycol (EG) and diethylene glycol (DEG).
"That would be the authority of BPOM," the minister remarked.
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The agency had recently announced two pharmaceutical companies that produced medicine containing dangerous levels of EG and DEG as contaminants.
The BPOM and Indonesian Police's Criminal Investigation Unit (Bareskrim) had investigated the case and conducted preliminary hearing on the case on October 31, 2022.
A professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Gadjah Mada University Tjandra Yoga Aditama said it would need further analysis of factors, apart from the medicine, that caused the AKI, such as infection, environmental factors, and certain habits of patients.
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"For this analysis, we need a thorough epidemiology evaluation of each child, including the condition at home, playing ground, or at school," Aditama stated.
The result of the analysis would contain demography, information on the course of the disease, medicines consumed by patients before they get ill, and other factors that might trigger the disease.
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Editor : Mahdani
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