Overview

• Madhya Pradesh formed a 12-member Special Investigation Team to trace production and distribution, with plans to visit the Sresan Pharmaceuticals unit in Tamil Nadu.
• Police arrested and suspended paediatrician Dr Praveen Soni, registered FIRs naming him and Sresan Pharmaceuticals under culpable homicide and drug adulteration provisions, and conducted exhumations for post-mortems.
• Multiple states, including Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, banned sale and seized stocks of the implicated Coldrif batch, with wider alerts issued nationwide.
• The Union Health Ministry and CDSCO launched risk-based inspections across 19 manufacturing units, issued advisories on paediatric cough-syrup use, and recommended cancellation of Sresan’s licence pending probes.
• Central laboratories were tasked with confirmatory testing after DEG and ethylene glycol were detected in the syrup, while ex-gratia payments were transferred to victims’ families and affected children remain under treatment in Nagpur.