More than 20 kids in India have died from contaminated cough syrup. Who's to blame?

toggle caption Praveen Paramasivam/Reuters

In India, this week, headlines capture the outrage.

"Cough Syrup Horror" reads India Today . New Delhi Television Ltd or NDTV declares: "Toxic Cough Syrup Scare: What Went Wrong And Why All Syrups Aren't Unsafe"

More than 20 children in India are dead. The cause: Cough syrup contaminated with industrial chemicals.

For many, it feels like deja vu.

"This is an issue which has been going on for 90 years or more," says Naseem Hudroge, an analyst at the World Health Organization's team on substandard and falsified medical products.

In that time, more than 1,300 people — many children under 5 — have died of this type of contamination. And it's happened all over the world, including in the U.S. in 1937 when over 100 people died from an antibiotic that had been formulated as a liquid syrup and contaminated. Today, most cases happen in low- and middle-income countries.

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For a long time each incident was thought of as an isolated tragedy. "They were all treated as one-offs," says Hudroge.

But that's changing.

Alarm bells

For Hudroge, his fascination with this issue — and determination to do something — started at 10 o'clock one night in the summer of 2022.

He was heading back to his hotel during a work trip when he saw a message about children dying in The Gambia in West Africa.

"I had a feeling this was somethin