Patients Used as Drug Guinea Pigs

Monday, September 23rd 2002

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A probe finds patients being bought and sold like commodities.

Revelations that thousands of Australians are being used as unsuspecting guinea pigs by multinational pharmaceutical companies have brought demands for tighter controls on drug testing.

Those tested including children and intellectually disabled people, have been included in trials by doctors who have received up to A$6000 (NZ$7370) in a booming trade that has seen the number of such tests rise 20-fold in the past decade.

An investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald said patients were being bought and sold like commodities, without being told that money changed hands when they volunteered for new treatments.

The investigation came in the wake of resignations from the committee overseeing the inclusion of drugs on subsidised lists, following the appointment of a former industry lobbyist.

Australian Health Minister Michael Wooldridge had earlier overridden the committee's recommendations on the subsidy level of the anti-arthritis drug, Celebrex, and made it Australia's most heavily subsidised drug.

As the reaction from the news-paper's investigation gathered pace, ABC Radio was contacted by a large number of people claiming they had been persuaded by their GP to take part in trials of Celebrex, with painful results.

An 84-year-old Adelaide pensioner, George Jones, said he had been told Celebrex was harmless when he was asked to trial the drug, but eight weeks later was still suffering agonising skin problems.

A Sydney woman, Helen James, told the Herald she had been placed on a trial of the anti-epilepsy drug Gabapentin by her neurologist, without being told that he was being paid for recruiting patients for manufacturer Parke-Davis.

This trial like most others, is designed to speed up the registration of the drug in the United States and Europe.

The report said Australia was being targeted for trials because of the decision in 1991 to end national oversight of the approval of clinical trials by the federal Therapeutic Goods Administration and instead pass it to ethics committees, comprising medical professionals and lay people.

With no control on the membership of the committees, which did not need to be attached to universities or hospitals, big foreign drugs companies had only to have a committee evaluate a study to get a new trial launched.

Boosted by the relative cheapness of trials and ease of approval, Australian trials had included experiments on dementia patients, the testing of hormone creams on menopausal women and new vaccines in children.

Health Minister Wooldridge yesterday defended Australian federal policies, but urged a nation wide approach to drug trails and payments to doctors.

He said other states should follow New South Wales, which bans kick backs to GPs and which yesterday launched an investigation into possible illicit payments. Other groups are calling for the establishment of a national register of clinical trials.

Source NZ Herald 14 February 2001

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