US Researchers And Pharmaceutical Companies Conducting Human Experimentation in Africa
by Farid Zakaria, PBFC – TRANSCEND Media Service
A new policy brief faults prominent institutions and drug companies like Pfizer, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and Population Council, for their involvement in unethical and illegal human experimentation in Africa.
The report is titled “Non-Consensual Research in Africa: The Outsourcing of Tuskegee” in reference to the illegal human experiment conducted in Tuskegee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service. In that experiment, some 600 impoverished African-American men were observed in a study on the progression of untreated syphilis. Some of the men were intentionally infected with the disease and all of them were denied the cure. Regrettably, the report notes, no one was held accountable for this crime against humanity.
The new report details human experiments led by US researchers and drug companies on Africans who are typically undereducated, poor, and lack full understanding of their rights. The human subjects often are led to believe that they are receiving medical treatment from governmental health services or health ministries.
These practices hearken back to the appalling experiments carried out by US researchers in Guatemala in the 1940s where hundreds of Guatemalans were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases without information or consent. President Obama formally apologized to Guatemala for these experiments last year.
Human experimentation in the United States is regulated by the Office of Research Integrity and various Ethical Research Institutional Boards. Many African countries lack these institutions. Even when they exist, they lack independence and are controlled by corrupt government officials.
In one experiment on HIV sponsored by Gilead Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and operated by Family Health International, Cameroonian subjects were given details about the experiment in English even though many spoke only French and were illiterate. Five women were allegedly infected with HIV in the experiment but were not given antiretroviral drugs.
In another experiment in Nigeria led by Pfizer physicians, researchers injected children with an antibiotic called Trovan during a meningitis outbreak without providing their families with informed consent forms that fully disclose the side effects and purpose of the experiment. Eleven children died and many were left paralyzed.
In South Africa and Namibia, mothers with HIV/AIDS are routinely sterilized without their informed consent. Countries that perform these procedures are known to receive funding in the form of grants and incentives from USAID and other aid organizations.
The report explains that US researchers and drug companies violate the laws and protocols of the Declaration at Helsinki (1964) and the Belmont Report which provide ethical guidelines on human experimentation.
Moreover, the results of unethical and fraudulent experiments are laundered in the United States and Europe through the peer-review system. Many of the “peers” who review these experiments are themselves involved in the same unethical conduct. Others are concerned about the possibility of professional alienation if they speak out.
The authors make several demands so that these practices are ended. They include holding congressional hearings so that the matter is brought to the public’s attention and enacting new legislation to ensure that drugs are not approved by the FDA unless the research on which they are based comply with ethical research principles.
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Farid Zakaria is a recent law school graduate and is interested in the intersection of law, technology, and society. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
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When human rights are ignored and when the spirit of the brotherhood/sisterhood for the whole humanity is forgotten, some people tend to be involved with horrible incidents against humanity. In that situation, you consider that your own citizens are the only human beings? In that situation, you consider that your own race is the only human race on earth?
The illegal human experiment that the above article discusses is one of those cases. There are many HIV/AIDS patients in America. Nonetheless, these experiments were conducted in Africa. If you want (or if you need) to conduct “illegal human experiments,” you do not go to Africa all the way from America. What do these experiments in Africa, not in America, imply?
During WWII, Germans conducted horrible human experiments. During WWII/Pacific War, Japanese also conducted illegal human experiments.
After the War, Germans and Japanese were accused of the crime against humanity. Now in the 21st Century, some American medical/pharmaceutical researchers, supported by USAID, are catching up the crime against humanity that Germans and Japanese committed in the last century?
Lao Tzu said in the Chapter 18 of “Tao Te Ching” (http://www.taoism.net/ttc/complete.htm) as follows:
“The great Tao fades away
There is benevolence and justice
Intelligence comes forth
There is great deception
“The six relations are not harmonious
There is filial piety and kind affection
The country is in confused chaos
There are loyal ministers”
If Lao Tzu is alive today, he would say:
Human rights ignored,
There are medical ethics
Brotherhood/sisterhood of humanity forgotten,
Justification for the advancement of medical science comes forth
—–
For information on the Declaration of Helsinki of 1964 and medical researchers’ ethics:
http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/helsinki/
http://research.unlv.edu/ORI-HSR/history-ethics.htm
For some information on Germans’ cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYYfib5hjWI
http://remember.org/educate/medexp.html
For some information on Japanese cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu7GMMIfvoo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/7236099/Human-bones-could-reveal-truth-of-Japans-Unit-731-experiments.html