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Written by:
L.Chinedu Arizona-Ogwu
Writes from Oyigbo;
Rivers State
08033973334

Western medical priorities Versus African Poverty And Ignorance:
The Case Of Pfizer and unethical drug trials in Nigeria!

By the dusty Nigerian city of Kano, was a tiny house off a dirt road in one of Kano’s poorer neighborhoods.Here lives  Mustapha Mohammed.He was a security guard.One of his nightmare becomes his worry:- his 14-year-old son has dazed eyes, he could not talk due  to uneven gait-signal of brain damage.One clinical test says polio and the other meningitis .Though the meningitis epidemic is long over and the polio vaccination program is back on track, carrying misinformation and misguidance.Mohammed is sure no one asked his permission to test a drug on his child. But he also wasn’t asking many questions when he rushed his son to the hospital.He was desperate for drugs.


A year later, Pfizer established a treatment center at the Infectious Disease Hospital in Kano to treat victims of the meningitis epidemic.About 200 Nigerian children were administer or drank  Pfizer medicines. Pfizer, instead of using safe and effective bacterial meningitis treatments, used the epidemic as an opportunity to conduct biomedical research experiments on Nigerian children involving Pfizer’s “new, untested and unproven” antibiotic, trovaflozacin mesylate, better known by its brand name, Trovan.

 There was ethical dilemmas;Children  treated were feared brain-damaged .  Pfizer failed to obtain informed consent, and  some children were deliberately given inadequate doses of ceftriaxone .Trovan  looks more effective by comparison. Several children died. The communication gap between those handing out medical alms and those receiving  bred mistrust and anger in Kano - with damaging, far-reaching effect.The fallout provides a case study of  an instance when Western medical priorities run into Third World poverty and ignorance. Across the town, Abu Abdullahi Madaki can’t be sure if her daughter Firdausi took part in the Pfizer study. Citing privacy concerns, Pfizer has declined to release the names.

All Madaki knows is she took a feverish 8-month-old infant to the hospital in 1996, and now her daughter suffers severe brain damage that left her unable to sit up or talk.Meningitis - a brain infection - leaves 10 percent to 20 percent of survivors with mental damage, hearing loss, or learning disabilities, according to the World Health Organization.But Madaki said: “My younger sister had meningitis, but it was nothing like this. My younger sister is now a mother with children.”

That was one reason residents of Kano and few states in Nigeria  boycotted a polio vaccine in 2003. And again threatening to repeat the same thing.Nigerians just took it in good faith . From informal education many Nigerians who can’t read or write  fell victim-. Some people  later found out that the pink paper they kept with Pfizer’s name and treatment dates meant their children had been in the study.Madaki, who is illiterate, said she’d always felt that the hospital did something wrong. She decided when she heard about the charges against Pfizer on the radio that her daughter must have been in the study.Hence,suspicion persist

New York-based Pfizer is faced four court cases - two filed by the Nigerian government and two by officials in the northern Nigerian state where Mohammed lives - over a decade-old drug study that included Mohammed’s son.The company, was denying any wrongdoing, but understood they used  1996 meningitis epidemic opportunity to push through a sloppily managed drug study that contributed to death in some and infirmities in others.The Pfizer case was cited as fearing it was a plot to make Africans infertile. Polio exploded in Nigeria and eventually spread to 25 previously polio-free countries.Pfizer says it explained the study to families using practices in line with U.S. and international guidelines, even employing Nigerian nurses and doctors who spoke Hausa, a main Nigerian language. Written permission was obtained when possible, or oral consent if parents were illiterate.

Three years ago; Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug maker faced four court cases and charges on attempted murder and miscellaneous offences in Nigeria  .The central events at issue in that lawsuit occurred in 1996, not long after epidemics of bacterial meningitis, measles and cholera broke out in Kano, Nigeria. What is the chance that justice was denied under such circumstances since Pfizer tried to keep the whole thing confidential by paying and bribing their way through .

L.Chinedu Arizona-Ogwu
Writes from Oyigbo;
Rivers State
08033973334

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