Pfizer Guinea Pig Database.

There are some pretty crazy things that occur in the name of “medicine”. For instance, when drug patents are about to expire and the company’s bottom line needs to be bolstered, ethical research practices can get thrown out the window. I’m  pretty sure we could create a gigantic database dedicated to keeping track of all the individuals who have participated in ethically questionable research.

While working on a paper, I came across Pfizer’s Trovan research in Nigeria. I don’t remember coverage of this story when it was revealed in 2000, but I hear it made some waves. Anybody remember it? Here’s a bit about it from the Washington Post:

The panel said an oral form of Trovan, the Pfizer drug used in the test, had apparently never been given to children with meningitis. There are no records documenting that Pfizer told the children or their parents that they were part of an experiment, it said. An approval letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, which Pfizer used to justify its actions had been concocted and backdated by the company’s lead researcher in Kano, the report said.

Pfizer contended that its researchers traveled to Kano with a purely philanthropic motive, to help fight the epidemic, which ultimately killed more than 15,000 Africans. The committee rejected that explanation, pointing out that Pfizer physicians completed their trial and left while “the epidemic was still raging.”

Read the full article-it’s pretty shocking. Any thoughts on this? Did Pfizer cross an ethical line or did the company just make a poor assumption that all the “appropriate” steps had been followed?  

Hmmmm…