People's Democracy

AIDWA DEMANDS

Don’t Make Indians Global Guinea Pigs

ON January 27, Subhashini Ali and Brinda Karat, president and general secretary respectively of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), met the union health minister Smt Sushma Swaraj and gave her a memorandum regarding the “changes in the present rules/laws so as to prevent Indians from becoming guinea pigs for clinical trials conducted by multinational pharma companies.” The text of memorandum follows.

“Dear Ms Sushma Swaraj ji,

“This is to draw your attention to the alarming increase in clinical trials by multinational pharmaceutical companies in India using poor Indians as guinea pigs. This is a kind of outsourcing that is both unethical and exploitative and is against our country’s interests. These companies do not conduct tests in their own countries because they cannot find willing participants in the numbers they require and also because they will be held accountable, including financially, for health damage that their trials may cause. It is no coincidence that although all the big pharma companies are based in the US or Europe, their major tests are conducted on poor people in third world countries. They believe that in countries like India they can exploit the vulnerability caused by unemployment and poverty to induce people to participate in clinical trials through material incentives. They know from their own experience that it is easier to manipulate conditions of informed consent in clinical trials in such countries where most of the participants in the trials are unlettered and where often official agencies share the view that the health concerns if not the lives of the poor are expendable.

“We have already seen the negative impact on women’s health of clinical trials in the case of contraceptives like Norplant or Net-en or with certain types of cancer research on women. We have also seen how conditions of ‘informed consent’ have been manipulated, how monitoring has been virtually non-existent, how there has been no follow up to understand the long term effects of trials on the participants and so on.

“It is estimated by pharma companies that the clinical studies market in India could increase from the present 70 million dollars to between 300 to 500 million dollars within a decade and, if ‘more incentives’ are given, to as much as a billion dollars.

“Poverty forces cruel strategies for survival on the poor including offering themselves as fodder for trials for drugs which, when finally produced, will be of little use to them or their children because the prices will be far beyond their reach. In any case, no government with even a minimum moral concern for the health rights of poor Indians, can allow them to become guinea pigs for multinational companies.

“We urge you to immediately intervene in the matter and put in place the necessary rules to prevent big pharma companies from exploiting our people through clinical trials.” (INN)