Translated with AI
Eight-year-old Muslima Ziyoboeva, who became a first-group disabled person as a result of consuming the Indian cough syrup Doc-1 Max, has died in Uzbekistan. The sad event occurred on July 3, the deceased girl’s father Ilkhom Azimov confirmed to Gazeta.uz .
Muslima was born in 2016 in the Jizzakh region, and would have turned 9 on August 22. According to court documents, in December 2022, a doctor prescribed the girl to take Doc-1 Max three times a day. Soon, the patient's kidneys failed and she could not urinate. She was initially hospitalized in a Jizzakh hospital, then transferred to the National Children's Medical Center in Tashkent. On the way, Ziyoboeva fell into a coma and only regained consciousness a week later.
Despite the course of treatment, the patient received a first-group disability. In November last year, during the trial of the Dok-1 Max case, her parents said that their daughter could not stand up, walk or talk, and the costs of child care exceeded 10 million soums (about $800) per month. At that time, the amount of expenses had already exceeded 1 billion soums ($79 thousand).
And then, on July 3, Muslima died. According to official data, she became the 69th victim of the deadly drug.
According to Gazeta.uz, despite the court's decision to provide compensation to those affected by the Indian medicine, many complain that they have not received the money. Parents of disabled children are demanding immediate payment of funds to ensure timely provision of necessary treatment, as the patients' health may worsen.
At the same time, Gulchekhra Murodova, an employee of one of the capital's courts, explained that the sentence has not yet entered into legal force due to the fact that some convicts filed appeals in December 2024. It took time to consider the appeals – in June of this year, the Tashkent City Court left the first instance sentence unchanged. After which the case was returned to the jurisdiction of the Uchtepa District Court, which sent a ruling on compensation payments to the Bureau of Compulsory Enforcement. Now this body must deal with the distribution of funds.
From autumn 2022 to January 2023, Uzbekistan began registering child deaths, the cause of which was indicated to be the use of the drug Doc-1 Max produced by the Indian company Marion Biotech. According to the Ministry of Health of Uzbekistan, ethylene glycol was found in a batch of the drug distributed in the country.
The State Security Service stated that during laboratory tests of the drug Doc-1 Max, the requirements of regulatory and legal documentation were grossly violated, as a result of which the low-quality syrup was allowed for sale. At a court hearing in October 2023, it was reported that the manufacturer of the drug and its Uzbek distributors paid doctors and pharmacists huge sums to promote the drug on the local market.
At a hearing on January 5, it was announced that the number of children who had died after taking the Indian syrup had risen to 68, and there were also victims who had become disabled. There were 23 defendants in the case.
On February 26, the court sentenced the head of the company distributing the drug, Indian citizen Raghvendra Pratar, to 20 years in prison. The former director of the Agency for the Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry of Uzbekistan, Sardor Kariev, received 18 years in prison, two of his deputies – 16 years each, and another – 16.5. The other defendants in the case were given a more lenient sentence.
