Big Pharma Tries Out First World Drugs on Unsuspecting Third World Patients 

By the end of July a US district court will decide whether drug giant Pfizer should stand trial in the United States for presiding over a coercive, botched 1996 experiment on Nigerian children with meningitis. In a class-action suit filed last August, thirty Nigerian families say the company violated the Nuremberg Code by forcing an unapproved, risky experiment on unwitting subjects who suffered brain damage, loss of hearing, paralysis and death as a result.

If allowed, the case will open a rare window on a business generally shrouded in FDA and Big Pharma secrecy: the global commerce in human experimentation. Over the past decade, the drug industry has quietly exported its clinical testing overseas, where oversight is slim and patients plentiful. According to a largely unnoticed Health and Human Services (HHS) report, the number of foreign investigators seeking FDA approvals increased sixteenfold between 1990 and 1999. The actual numbers are probably much higher--companies aren't required to alert the FDA before taking their research overseas, nor does the FDA track research by location after approving new drugs.

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Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0614-06.htm
Published in the July 1, 2002 issue of The Nation