Remember that Ralph Feinnes movie set in Africa where his wife discovered that Big Pharma was using the local people as drug dummies - giving them experimental drugs and watching the results to create data to approve them? Chilling is my best adjective for the effect it had on me.Now it appears that in 1996 the drug Giant Pfizer used about 200 Nigeriankids as guinea pigs during a meningitis epidemic. Trovan Floxacin was administered; a drug not licenced for use anywhere in the world. results, according to the kids' parents, ranged from deafness to death.
Of course, a US court dismissed the less well heeled Nigerian plaintiff's attempt in court for justice.
One of the whistle blowers was Medicines Sans Frontiers, that wonderful group of medical practitioners who cross borders to administer free surgical help in some of the worst war zones on earth. MSF sources say the Pfizer doctors wanted to compare drugs, so when the kids didn't respond, they just kept on dosing them.
"In normal circumstances, the first thing you do when a patient does not respond to a drug when dealing with a killer like meningitis is to change the drug. They did not do this. they kept them on it, an authoritative MSF souce said.
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