Panama govt issues fake drug death tally

The government of Panama has issued its first official estimate of the number of people killed after a counterfeit ingredient from an unlicensed production site in China was used to produce cough medicines. Out of 174 people known to have been poisoned in 2006 by diethylene glycol, a solvent used to make antifreeze, 115 died (Marketletters passim). Jose Vincente Pachar, the Director of the Public Health Ministry's Institute of Legal Medicine, admitted to the New York Times that "we will never know the full extent" of the problem.

Unofficial estimates range from 184 poisonings with 123 deaths, to over 700. The Panama government has come under considerable local pressure over the issue, partly because the country's public health service mixed the contents of 46 barrels of the antifreeze component into 260,000 bottles of cough syrup. In addition, a protest by the relatives of some of the deceased was broken up by riot police, a move Panama's President Martin Torrijos later described as "sad and lamentable."