Pfizer Tests Unapproved Drugs on African Children

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that there are no lengths that pharmaceutical companies won't go to furthur their profits at the expense of human life. Most of my accusations against them deal with excessive, unnecessary advertising which drives up costs of prescription drugs, as well as a reluctance to invest in research into disease-curing drugs, as it they are not profitable compared to symptom-treating drugs.

Now, it seems that Pfizer has been testing unapproved drugs on Nigerian children during a 1996 outbreak of meningitis [link]. According to Pfizer, they only wanted to help with the crisis, but as soon as the clinical trial of the drug was complete, the Pfizer doctors left, while "the epidemic was still raging." The drug, Trovan, had never been given to children with meningitis, and five children died after being treated with it. The drug was approved for use in adults in 1997, but due to many cases of liver damage and several deaths, the FDA has severely restricted it's use, and it has been banned in Europe.

Medicine is hardly my specialty, but it seems meningitis it is treatable by traditional antibiotics [link].

It is of course possible that no one died as a direct result of taking the drug, however, even if that is the case, it is truely criminal for proven drugs to be withheld from children for the sake of testing an unapproved drug. It seems that Pfizer was able to keep this secret for years, and it is highly unlikely that anyone involved will face criminal charges.