Nigeria polio shootings in Kano 'kill 12'

[Catherina]

18. Pfizer beat them to the punch

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In all, 11 children died in the trial: five after taking Trovan and six after taking an older antibiotic used for comparison in the clinical trial. Others suffered blindness, deafness and brain damage.

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The distrust of Western medicine that the dispute engendered was one of several factors that led many families in northern Nigeria to refuse to let their children be vaccinated against polio. (Other factors were rumors that the polio vaccine contained the AIDS virus or represented a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls.) Northern Nigeria is still one of the world’s last remaining epicenters of polio.

Trovan was introduced in 1998 and became a lucrative product for Pfizer, but it was later withdrawn in Europe and restricted in the United States after the drug was blamed for cases of fatal liver damage.

Last year, a secret 2009 State Department cable exposed by WikiLeaks said that a Pfizer official in Nigeria told American diplomats that the company had hired private investigators to “uncover corruption links” to Nigeria’s former attorney general in order to pressure him to drop the Trovan lawsuits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/africa/12nigeria.html

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The government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group an untested antibiotic called Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.

The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use." Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.

Pfizer and its doctors "agreed to do an illegal act," the criminal charges state, and behaved "in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life."

Internal Pfizer records obtained by The Washington Post show that five children died after being treated with the experimental antibiotic, though there is no indication in the documents that the drug was responsible for the deaths. Six children died while taking the comparison drug.

Suspicion stirred by news of the drug trial has been so intense in Kano, the lawsuit says, that parents last year refused to allow their children to be immunized against polio, frustrating a program aimed at wiping out one of the disease's last refuges.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052902107.html

Nigeria's health minister appointed a panel of experts to look into Pfizer's actions, but its final report was suppressed without explanation. Last year, The Post obtained a copy, which revealed that the panel had concluded Pfizer's actions violated Nigerian law, the international Declaration of Helsinki and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The panel said Pfizer administered an oral form of Trovan that apparently had never been given to children with meningitis. It said there were no records documenting that Pfizer told the children or their parents that they were part of a drug trial. And it said an approval letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, which Pfizer used to justify its actions, was a sham concocted long after the trial ended.

"The families of the children who [Pfizer] used as laboratory guinea pigs were led to believe and in fact understood that the Defendants were providing their children with volunteer relief, clearly focused humanitarian medical intervention and nothing more," the lawsuit says.

Parents were not told that alternative treatments were available, it adds.

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The lawsuit contends that Pfizer researchers left the area during the epidemic, took all medical records and "obliterated any evidence" of the trial.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052902107_2.html