HomeOld_PostsDrug trials in Africa and their consequences: Part Two

Drug trials in Africa and their consequences: Part Two

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THE story about drug trials being conducted in Africa by big pharmaceutical companies from the US, in particular, and the West, in general, is something that demands we pay more critical attention to it.
There is a real danger that Africa may be used as a vast and largely unmonitored and unregulated laboratory for all kinds of bio-medical/chemical experiments which may end up doing more harm than good to our people.
The reason Africa is bound to attract many drug trials is that our medical control regimes are relatively more relaxed than in the West; even if they were as stringent as those of the West, we often lack the resources, if not the will, to enforce them. Moreso, when some of these companies come to us as medical Samaritans venturing into Africa in order to rescue us from our misery.
For instance, during an epidemic of meningitis in the city of Kano, Nigeria, in 1996, a drug giant, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, rushed in to administer an experimental antibiotic called Trovan to as many children as they could access. In the process of doing so the company fell short on the following:
l Pfizer did not seek and was never granted informed consent. Instead its doctors relied on vague verbal consent solicited from concerned parents by nurses.
l Pfizer never bothered to inform the parents concerned or the Nigerian government for that matter about the drug’s unapproved status back in the US.
l In one case which later on stood out as unprofessional to a point of callousness, Pfizer administered only three day’s worth of Trovan to a 10-year-old girl identified in a subsequent government report as patient 0069. When her condition deteriorated, she was not given any form of treatment until she died! Why?
Perhaps her death was meant to prove some very important point of medical value to Pfizer but at the expense of a life. As far as Pfizer was concerned, she became the sacrificial lamb who had to die so that it could make money on a global scale.
l Pfizer undertook an illegal clinical trial since it did not bother to get formal authorisation from the Nigerian government. Faced with a lawsuit from the Nigerian government later on, it is said that Pfizer ‘concocted and backdated a letter of approval from a Nigerian Medical Ethics Committee’.
What we read here is Pfizer’s contempt for the Nigerian government and its laws, rank dishonesty which characterises some of its operations in Africa and a brutal disregard for African lives.
In all 11 children died during Pfizer’s drug trials in Nigeria, while several others suffered blindness, deafness and brain damage.
Throughout the period, Pfizer was conducting its drug trials in Nigeria, it consistently projected itself as a well-meaning philanthropic organisation determined to fight the meningitis epidemic and to do its best to eradicate this menace for the good of Africa.
Pfizer also hinted that it would remain in Nigeria for the long haul and would only quit when its job was done. The reality, however, is that the drug company left Nigeria as soon as it completed its drug trials.
Today there are thousands of drug companies out there in the West which are keen to come to Africa and carry out drug trials of the kind which would be regarded as illegal and unethical to the extent of being almost criminal. And the reasons for this are obvious:
We are supposed to be a poor and ‘Dark Continent’ which cannot afford to say no to all sorts of medical experiments which, if carried out in the West, would automatically generate lawsuits of one form or other.
After all, beggars cannot be choosers. They have to do with whatever is dished out to them.
The other reason is that we are supposed to be an ignorant lot and unlikely to suspect that some of these drug trials are likely to bring more harm than good.
In the case of Pfizer, all it needed to do was to put on the garb of a missionary of some sort, speak here and there about its dedication and commitment to Africa and sound almost religious and Christian in its rhetoric in order to make its way into Africa and carry out its medical experiments.
And it did this without raising any suspicions at all.
On our part, we are likely to believe in anyone from the West whose words and deeds are surrounded by a quasi-religious rhetoric of some sort! After all the white missionary of yore did his homework many generations before.
Through his sermons which promised all manner of heavenly rewards he laid the foundation for us to believe in anything that whites who come to Africa may preach to us that is many centuries after.
As Africans we need to outgrow our innocent belief that people who come from the West are always well-meaning and Samaritans keen to assist us. It is a naive belief and a dangerous one at that!
Drug companies are first and foremost capitalist enterprises dedicated to the creation of profit.
Accordingly, any good work that they may do in the process of generating profit is not necessarily part of their core business.
It is interesting to note that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to approve Trovan as a drug to use in treating any American children. This outcome was a major blow to Pfizer which had hoped to make more than a billion dollars annually as net profit from its intended global sales.
More tragically for us, this wise decision by the US FDA could only be made after we had lost 11 children, with many others maimed for life. This means that some African children had to die first, others had to get maimed first, in order for American children to remain safe and protected from Pfizer’s experimental drugs.
Today Trovan remains banned in Europe and in many countries of the West, courtesy of the guinea-pigs from Nigeria.

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