KATHMANDU, NEPAL – Away from the central bus park in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, and the hustle and bustle of the Balaju area, life has stopped some two kilometers away in Goldhunga, another village in the district.
Inside a one-story house there, Purna Patuwar lies in bed. His eyes are moist as he holds a photograph of his wife close to his chest. They were married in April 2011, but she died before the year ended.
His mother, Sami Patuwar, tries to console her grief-stricken son.
“I think it was your destiny,” she says to her son.
She says her daughter-in-law died from taking expired medicine.
“Expired medicines killed my daughter-in-law, and I haven’t been able to comfort my son,” she says.
Patuwar says he hasn’t been able to overcome the loss.
“I only have her thoughts on my mind,” he says with tears in his eyes.
He says he met his wife, Soniya Tamang, when she was 17 and instantly fell in love. He went to Qatar for foreign employment soon after they met, but upon Tamang’s insistence, he returned after 22 months abroad so they could get married.
Among the reasons for her haste, Tamang was already pregnant before the couple married. But the couple decided not to have a baby so soon, so they decided to abort the child. Eight days after their wedding, Patuwar says they went to a nearby pharmacy for the abortion.
At Miteri Pharmacy, Patuwar says there was a line of women waiting for their turns to receive abortions. Patuwar agreed to pay Bhim Bahadur KC, the man who ran the pharmacy, 2,500 rupees ($30) to perform the abortion.
As his wife went inside with KC, Patuwar waited outside. Seven minutes later, he heard KC yelling for him to call a cab.
They rode in the cab for only a couple of minutes to a hospital located half a kilometer from the pharmacy. But Tamang was already unconscious, and the doctor pronounced her dead at the hospital.
Tamang’s postmortem report and the police record attribute her death to an expired muscle relaxant drug that KC gave to her before the abortion.
“It is because the pharmacist used the expired medicine that my wife died,” Patuwar says.
The pharmacy was a registered facility. But Bijaya Laxmi Shrestha, a senior pharmacist in the industry, says that what KC was doing – performing abortions and dispensing expired medicine – was against the law.
Neon Laboratories Ltd. manufactured the muscle relaxant that killed Tamang in 2009 in India, according to research by the Department of Drug Administration under the Ministry of Health and Population. Called Necocuron, the muscle relaxant had expired in February 2011.
Minutes after Tamang received the injection, she was unconscious, says Dinesh Lohani, deputy superintendent of the Balaju Police Office. Fifteen minutes later, Tamang was dead.
“This is sheer negligence,” Lohani says. “Incidents like these occur frequently.”
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