Indian Drugs Are a Global Lifeline. For Dozens of Children, They Were Deadly.

They had fevers, aches, runny noses, the normal stuff of childhood. The kind of illnesses for which a doctor would prescribe cough syrup.

But the children’s condition only worsened. They developed persistent diarrhea, then could no longer urinate, as their kidneys failed. The very medicines that were supposed to make them better, simple cough syrups imported from India, were instead killing them, because they turned out to be poison.

In all, 70 children in the tiny West African nation of Gambia are suspected to have died in recent months from contaminated Indian-made cough syrups. Among them was 2-year-old Muhammad Lamin Kijera, who died on Aug. 4.

“He was lively and likable — he was everybody’s friend,” said his father, Alieu Kijera, who works as a nurse at an eye clinic in Banjul, the Gambian capital. “How can they allow something like this into the country, destroying lives?”

India has taken to calling itself “the world’s pharmacy” as its drug industry has expanded rapidly, providing a lifeline to the developing world by selling medicines, many of them generics, for an array of illnesses like malaria and AIDS at prices lower than those of American or European drugs.

But the deaths in Gambia have raised alarm over what one expert called a “dangerous cocktail”: on one side, a $50 billion Indian pharmaceutical industry whose regulation has remained loose and chaotic despite repeated calamities, and on the other, poor nations with little or no way to test the quality of the medicines they import.