On August 29, distraught parents in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, watched their four-year-old child die of kidney failure. They couldn’t figure out why, as all they had done was administer a cough syrup prescribed by a doctor. A second death followed on September 5, when a three-year-old girl died, also of acute kidney failure. It cascaded after that, as a rash of deaths and hospital admissions broke out in different parts of the state. Preliminary investigations showed that these children ha