The Nigerian government is about to announce the results of its investigation into the use by the giant American drugs company Pfizer, of an experimental drug on sick children. The experiments were carried out in 1996, in the midst of a terrible meningitis epidemic which swept across northern Nigeria, leaving thousands dead, and thousands more permanently disabled.
Pfizer rushed a medical team to the worst affected city, Kano, and treated about 100 children with the powerful Trovan drug. The company says its intervention was primarily humanitarian , and that parents of the children who took Trovan knew they were participating in an experiment.
The drug was later licensed for use in the United States, but on a restricted basis, and not on children. Criticism of the tests only began last December.
Widespread outrage in Nigeria prompted the government into launching an inquiry. Doctors and nurses in Kano told the Today Programme that they were unhappy with the ethics of testing a new drug on young children in the midst of an epidemic, in an atmosphere of panic and desperation. "Parents would have agreed to anything because they wanted their children to be cured" one nurse told us.
And further concerns have been raised by the revelation that one of the key documents Pfizer has used to justify the tests, an endorsement from the ethics committee of Kano's biggest hospital, is a forgery. "That document is not genuine", a senior doctor said, " this hospital did not even have an ethics committee at the time it purports to have been written".
Pfizer says it is not responsible for the forgery. But whatever conclusions the Nigerian government reaches, this case has raised yet more concerns about the role of multinational drug companies in the developing world.
