Health officials announced on Friday that at least 84 children from Nigeria have been killed by a toxic chemical which had been mixed with a teething medicine. The new death toll is three times bigger than the one at the beginning of November last year, when the wave of infant death had began.

My Pikin Baby Teething Mixture is the name of the medicine which consists of a syrup designed to cure the teething pain. Nigeria’s Health Ministry stated that some of the medicines which went on sale in November contained diethylene glycol, which is an ingredient in antifreeze and brake fluid. Yet, in spite of its effects, the chemical looks and smells like glycerin.

Glycerin is usually used in many medicines, foods and toothpaste, being a sweet syrup. Yet, in spite of its expensive price, doctors prefer it instead of the cheap diethylene glycol, because of its harmless effects. The diethylene glycol causes liver and kidney damage and it usually attacks the nervous system too.

The infants and children in Nigeria started to get sick in November 2007. They had fevers and vomiting which couldn’t be explained and some of them even stopped urinating, while others had diarrhea. The Health Ministry said that the high concentration of the diethylene glycol caused the death of three-quarters of the sick children.

Nigeria’s minister of health, Babatunde Osotimehin, stated that this poison killed many children aged between 2 months and 7 years old in Nigeria. The investigators from Nigeria’s National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control have searched for the chemical and found it at an unlicensed chemical dealer from Lagos.

The dealer had sold the chemical to Barewa Pharmaceuticals, the company which created the teething medicine. The company was shut down and all the medicine containing the chemical was pulled out of the market. Yet, the investigators couldn’t trace how much teething medicine had been done with the diethylene glycol.