(MENAFN- Live Mint) The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the cough syrup tragedy that led to the deaths of 24 children in Madhya Pradesh arrested the wife of the accused Dr Praveen Soni, an official said on Tuesday, according to PTI.

Officials said Dr Praveen Soni's wife owns the medical store from which the cough syrup was sold to numerous victims.

Dr Soni, based in Chhindwara, was taken into custody by the MP police last month for alleged negligence after he reportedly prescribed the contaminated cough syrup 'Coldrif ' to many of the affected children, who later died of kidney failure.

His wife, Jyoti Soni, also named in the case, was arrested from their home in Parasia town, Chhindwara district, on Monday night, according to Sub-Divisional Officer of Police and SIT in-charge Jitendra Jaat.

A total of seven individuals have been taken into custody in connection with the incident, the official said. Sresan Pharma's owner, G Ranganathan, medical representative Satish Verma, chemist K Maheshwari, wholesaler Rajesh Soni, and medical store pharmacist Sourabh Jain have been arrested.

At least 24 children in Madhya Pradesh, most of them below five years of age, died from suspected kidney failure after being given Coldrif cough syrup. At least three children also died after consuming the syrup in neighbouring Rajasthan. The tragedy prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to issue an alert against three“substandard” oral cough syrups identified in India, namely Coldrif, Respifresh TR and ReLife.

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Meanwhile, in the wake of the child deaths, the Tamil Nadu government cancelled the licence of the cough syrup manufacturing firm, Sresan Pharma.

The Tamil Nadu Director of Drugs Control, on 2 October, found that Coldrif samples were not of standard quality.

Madhya Pradesh officials found that one sample of Coldrif contained 48.6% of diethylene glycol, a toxic chemical, far surpassing the 0.1% permissible limit as an impurity.

After the deaths, the syrup was banned in Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Puducherry, West Bengal and Delhi.

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Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav asserted that“the guilty in the case shall not be spared.”

The state government also took disciplinary action by suspending the drug controller and the assistant drug controller for their negligence in testing random medicine samples, and subsequently formed an SIT to conduct a detailed probe into the incident.

The Tamil Nadu government sealed Sresan Pharma's manufacturing facility soon after the deaths of children, as part of its crackdown following the tragedy.

(With inputs from PTI)

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