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World Many Drugs For U.S. Kids Tested In Poor Countries

Vikram singh

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Feb 24, 2005
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By Frederik Joelving Frederik Joelving Mon Aug 23, 7:24 am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A law intended to speed up development of new drugs for U.S. kids has ended up financing clinical trials in poor countries, where the medicines might never become available.
That's the conclusion of a new report whose authors say the situation raises ethical concerns.
More than a third of the published trials performed under 1997 legislation called the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision were carried out at least partly in developing or transitioning nations, such as Uganda and India, researchers found.
"The trend that we describe brings up some scientific and ethical problems," said Dr. Sara K. Pasquali, a pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, whose findings appear in the journal Pediatrics.
"Oftentimes, access to a study may be the only access to medical care a family has," she said of trial participants in developing countries. Once the testing is done, however, it's unclear if effective drugs will be marketed in the country in question, and whether they will be affordable.
Among the 174 trials the researchers examined, drugs against infectious diseases were most likely to be tested in the developing world, closely followed by heart, allergy and arthritis medications.
"We are now using vulnerable people in vulnerable countries as drug laboratories," Dr. Marcia Angell, who was not involved in the new research, told Reuters Health. "It is all about dollars and cents."
"Whether in children or adults, no clinical trials should be done in undeveloped countries unless they are trials to test a drug for a disease that only occurs there," said Angell, who teaches social medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The idea behind the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision is to incentivize development of drugs for children in the U.S.
Because many diseases are rare in childhood, clinical trials usually target adults only, and their results don't automatically extend to kids. The pediatric provision grants companies an extra six months of patent life if they test their drugs in kids as well.
So far, those patent extensions have netted drugmakers an estimated $14 billion dollars, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the same time, more than 150 drugs have been approved for children since 1997, said Pasquali.
"There are certainly both advantages and disadvantages to consider," she said of the rapid globalization of clinical research, adding that it makes recruiting participants easier and carrying out drug trials cheaper.
According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade association, there is no difference in the way trials are conducted in the U.S. and abroad.
"All of our companies follow our principles on conducting clinical trials," said Mark Grayson, a spokesman for the association. "No matter where we are we follow our principles."
Those principles include getting informed consent from the research participants (or in the case of children, their parents), ethical approval by an independent board, and training local investigators.
But the meaning of something like "informed consent" might not be clear in a different cultural context. One study from 2008, for instance, tested how much women in Ghana understood about the clinical trial they were part of.
The women were taking either vitamin A or a dummy pill, yet more than 90 percent actually believed they were getting an active and beneficial medication.
M. Nabeel Ghayur, a pharmacologist who worked in drug development in Pakistan before joining McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, said conditions are similar in India and Pakistan.
"People actually have blind trust in their doctor in South Asia. They have no idea what drug development is, they have no idea what clinical trials are," he told Reuters Health.
He said there was little red tape in those countries, and that people would rarely ask about drug side effects and legal issues.
"Recruiting people is easy, getting informed consent is easy, getting approval is easy, paying the patients and paying the doctors is easy," Ghayur said. "The physicians and investigators have absolutely no idea about the seriousness of the situation."
Pasquali said drugmakers needed to be held to a higher standard. For instance, she said, they could be required to describe how appropriate a drug would be for the country in which it is to be tested.
In addition, transparency could be increased by publishing all trials in medical journals -- something that happened less than half the time for the trials done under the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision. (See Reuters Health story of Aug 2, 2010.)
"Children are a vulnerable population," Pasquali said.
SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/gas77m Pediatrics, online August 23, 2010.
 

Brother Onam

Writer
SPNer
Jul 11, 2012
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Waheguru Waheguru,
I would strongly encourage any concerned Sikhs to try to watch the movie "The Constant Gardener". A wonderful movie, very much rooted in truth.
 
Jan 26, 2012
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I'm reading a book called 'Bad Pharma' by Dr. Ben Goldacre.

It goes into detail about how big pharmaceuticals manipulate data and drug trials.

Well worth a read. Eye opening to say the least.
 
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