When two health volunteers set out from Niloufer Hospital to purchase a drug for a child who was in a critical condition on Saturday, little they did realise that they were venturing out to race against time and fight odds to save a life.
The mandate was to purchase eight vials of the injectable Deferoxamine for the child who was rushed to the hospital on Friday evening from Mahabubnagar; the sisters had iron poisoning, resulting from excess iron content in the blood. Before they passed out, the girls told the treating doctors at Niloufer that they had consumed pills they found in a garbage dump. On Saturday morning, one of the sisters, three-year-old Renuka, died.
“Little did we know we would visit every large pharmacy in the city and not find the drug,” said D. Swarupa Rani, a volunteer with the Helping Hand Foundation, who received the SOS while on volunteering at MNJ Cancer Hospital.
Iron poisoning is a potentially fatal condition but one which presents time for management, says Dr. Imron Subhan, who heads the Emergency Department at Apollo Hospital. “Iron tablets are colourful and attractive to children.
They are also widely prescribed as anaemia is common in children and women. An overdose leading to toxicity requires intense management,” he said.
Rani and her volunteer colleague Mahesh were told that the older sister Malleshwari, 6, needed to get Deferoxamine shots by Saturday evening to survive. The drug binds to iron in the blood and helps the body shed it.
“We visited pharmacies across the city and also visited blood banks as Deferoxamine is also used for thalassaemia. But we could not get the drug,” Rani said. Incidentally, the drug, manufactured by one pharma giant, is often in the news due to shortage.
“When we could not find it anywhere, we reached out to the company’s distributor. We could get it by 4.30 p.m. after searching all morning and afternoon,” Dr. Subhan said. The drug was administered to Malleshwari and she opened her eyes for the first time since Friday.
“Doctors have said her chances of recovery have improved after the drug administration,” Rani added with a sigh of relief.