<Anchor>
Hundreds of people have been damaged by the wrong ingredients of sleeping pills in a Japanese pharmaceutical company to treat athlete's foot.
There was even an accident where people lost consciousness while driving after taking athlete's foot medicine.
This is Tokyo's correspondent Yoo Seong-jae.
<Reporter> This
is Kobayashi Chemical, a pharmaceutical company located in Fukui Prefecture, Japan.
Patients who took the company's dietary athlete's foot treatment began to complain of side effects of instantaneous loss of consciousness and memory from last December.
[Patient: My legs were twisted and I fell in a normal place.
I thought it was weird...
.]
There have also been 22 reports of traffic accidents due to sudden loss of consciousness while driving.
[Patient: I was hazy for a moment, then I woke up and hit the median.
There was a car on the other side, so they almost died.] In the
past three months, 239 people across Japan have suffered adverse drug reactions, and 41 of them have been hospitalized.
In addition, two elderly people aged 70 and over lost their lives.
As a result of a survey by health authorities, this athlete's foot drug was found to contain more than 2.5 times the maximum dose of a single adult sleeping pill.
This happened when one person did the raw material mixing work that two people had to do.
There are about 90,000 tablets of athlete's foot medicine sold on the market.
It was also revealed that the company had been making over 500 drugs in the past 40 years by unauthorized procedures.
Fukui prefecture ordered the company to suspend its business for 116 days, the longest ever.
[Kobayashi/Pharmaceutical Company Representative: We sincerely apologize.] The
reason behind this crappy pharmaceutical company's annual sales growth of 300 billion won is that the Japanese government's poor management of the generic drug market to lower medical costs was also a factor.
(Video coverage: Han Cheol-min, Video editing: Committee member)