The Japanese pharmaceutical group Kobayashi Pharmaceutical announced on Friday March 29 that it was investigating a fifth death potentially linked to some of its food supplements, at the center of a vast health scandal in the country. These products contained red yeast rice, beni koji, which is supposed to lower blood cholesterol.
The number of people hospitalized in Japan in connection with this case has increased to one hundred and fourteen, the group also specified during a press conference. Patients suffer in particular from kidney failure. On Thursday, the company had already reported two new suspicious deaths.
A case of hospitalization in Taiwan also potentially linked to food supplements from Kobayashi Pharmaceutical was also reported Thursday by local media. If this link is confirmed, it would be the first known case outside Japan.
“Great anxiety”
“I deeply apologize for the great anxiety we have caused,” the president of this family group, Akihiro Kobayashi, said on Friday, bowing to the cameras with other executives of his company in a sign of contrition.
He also said he “regretted” that the company only communicated on the subject at the end of last week by launching the recall of three ranges of products in question, even though it had received a first report by a doctor as of January 15.
Kobayashi Pharmaceutical and Japanese health authorities are still working to identify which substance in the red yeast rice of the incriminated dietary supplements could be the cause of the reported hospitalizations and deaths.
This group from Osaka (western Japan) also said on Friday that it wanted to compensate people suffering from side effects or being hospitalized after consuming its food supplements.
The company admitted this week that it had also supplied its red yeast rice to around fifty other companies in Japan, as well as two companies in Taiwan. As a precaution, most of these companies have in turn recalled their own products containing this yeast, such as sparkling sake, salad dressing or fermented soy paste (miso).
