The Japanese company Kobayashi Pharmaceutical announced on Friday that it had identified 76 additional deaths potentially linked to its anti-cholesterol food supplements containing red yeast rice, at the heart of a resounding health scandal in Japan for several months.
In a previous update on the case in April, Kobayashi Pharmaceutical reported five deaths potentially linked to its products, which have since been withdrawn from the market. This initial number has since been reduced to four.
This therefore brings the provisional total of suspicious deaths in this case to 80.
The causes of these deaths “must still be verified by doctors” and therefore it is possible that the final number will drop, an official from the Japanese Ministry of Health told AFP on Friday.
Many people who had consumed these food supplements, suspected of causing kidney problems, have also been hospitalized.
“Even if the direct cause of hospitalization or death is not kidney disease,” it has “become clear” that in some cases, consumption of the products in question has had “indirect” adverse effects on the health of some people, according to a statement from Kobayashi Pharmaceutical.
Concretely, these products have often created comorbidity situations, worsening the health of people who already suffered from other illnesses.
The Osaka (western Japan) company only announced the recall of three product lines after mid-March, although it had received a first worrying report from a doctor on January 15.
– “Extremely regrettable” –
In late March, the company said it had identified puberulic acid, a toxic substance naturally produced by mold, in batches of its recalled products.
But the pharmaceutical company and Japanese health authorities are still working to understand precisely why and how this massive health scandal occurred.
Japan’s health ministry has now ordered Kobayashi Pharmaceutical to provide a daily report on its internal investigation.
“Until now (the company, editor’s note) had not reported the precise number of cases examined, which is extremely regrettable,” Japanese government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi told the press on Friday.
Red yeast rice (called “beni koji” in Japan) has been used for centuries in East Asia in food, alcoholic beverages and traditional Chinese medicine for its digestive and circulation-improving properties.
This yeast contains a natural statin, monacolin K, capable of inhibiting cholesterol synthesis.
As Kobayashi Pharmaceutical had indicated in late March that it had also produced red yeast rice for around 50 other companies in Japan and Taiwan, many of these companies had in turn carried out emergency recalls of their own products containing this yeast, such as sparkling sake, salad dressing or fermented soybean paste (“miso”).
Kobayashi Pharmaceutical’s shares collapsed by 7% on Friday at the end of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It has fallen 22% since the start of the year because of this scandal.
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