Drug giant experimented on kids - GlaxoSmithKline

THE GUARDIAN , NEW YORK
Tuesday, Apr 06, 2004,Page 6

Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection

Orphans and babies as young as three months old have been used as guinea pigs in potentially dangerous medical experiments sponsored by a giant pharmaceutical company.

British giant GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in the scandal.

The firm sponsored experiments on the children from Incarnation Children's Center, a New York care home that specializes in treating HIV sufferers and is run by Catholic charities.

The children had either been infected with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers.

Their parents were dead, untraceable or deemed unfit to look after them.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/04/06/2003116879

How much did Glaxo donate to aWol?

For a long time, I thought that the animal rights protesters were rather from anything I would consider reasonable. Now, I see what they are getting at. Here it is: experimenting on babies, simply because it is cheap, just as they would do so with animals, if it were as cheap.

Disgusting? Horrible? I cannot even begin to describe it. Inhumane, in the least.

<snip>
Some of these trials were designed to test the "toxicity" of AIDS medications.

One involved giving children as young as 4 years old a high-dosage cocktail of seven drugs at one time.

Another looked at the reaction in six-month-old babies to a double dose of measles vaccine.
<snip>
What does the double dose on the measles vaccine have to do anything? This is just terrible. I hope this bites them in the ass. Hard.

and as they pointed out on KPFT, these kids are already burdened with more than their share of problems. Just what they need, to be dosed with extra untested meds.

Didn't these guys know they were dealing with human beings?

Experiment on sick babies because their mothers are dead. Nice.

What's the difference between that and Joseph Mengele's experiments?

...and many drug companies don't do trials on sick kids because they don't want the parents to sue if the drug has a completely unexpected and untoward reaction.

Bear in mind that these are sick kids, most of them heading toward an early and ugly death without treatment, and that no treatment may be currently available.

The ethics of this aren't completely black and white. Those trials on sick kids in an AIDS hospice might have saved them as well as made them worse. We simply don't know without pediatric testing. The only question I would have is whether or not there was a court appointed guardian to monitor the kids, make certain the trials were carried out under NIH guidelines and weren't just a callous fishing experiment.

Most drugs we have now were tested first on healthy volunteers, mainly in male prison populations. We're only now discovering just how differently men and women react to some of the same medications, and the difference is tenfold for kids who are still growing rapidly.
The ethics of testing on kids without a parent to speak for them is shady; the testing is essential.

Informed consent is essential to ethics in drug trials. Obviously, children cannot give informed consent. The ethics are beyond shady, they are illegal. I can't imagine any ethics committee at any university giving consent to this. Some 'friend of the court' should sue the company, and criminal charges should be laid.

Please don't tell me that this is the only way sick babies could get treatment in America.

The have HIV ... no real love ones ... already sentenced to death ... Try to help them for free ... that is the call .. nothing more nothing less

it used to be. They weren't trying to help them, they didn't want to spend the money on test subjects. Nothing more, nothing less.

They used to give aspirin to kids all the time to bring down their fevers. They found out in the 1960s that if you give aspirin to kids with certain viral illnesses, they develop Reyes Syndrome, and end up with severe brain damage if they live through it. People just assumed that aspirin, the most widely used drug in the country at the time, was as safe for kids as it was for adults.

It wasn't.

Moral absolutes and jumping to silly conclusions don't work when you're discussing things like pediatric drug trials. They are essential if we're to help these and other kids live longer.

I just think that it seemed that they were using these children as "guinea pigs" because there was no one there to tell them not to. It just seems wrong. I don't think that is a silly conclusion. I KNOW that drug tests are essential, I just don't like the way this smells.

The testing done on these innocent ones, is disgusting, indeed. The giant pharm industries have lost all credibility in this case as well as in their "push" for the mass distribution of antidepressants to those under 18 yrs.

The controversy over such use was hailed as necessary, and in some cases, useful.
However, as with all corporations, seeing their profits rise, attributed to the mass distribution of these drugs for every emotional ailment.
They were touted as safe and beneficial, w/minimal side effects. Now, after, many suicide attempts and completions, we find out the true dangers of antidepressants and their true effects on the human brain.

This is not new news. Much was said a few years ago, about the bizaar behavior, especially suicide, from such antidepressants as Paxil, Prosac, Zoloft etc.
The pharm co.s knew the data, yet continued to change dispensing laws to target the under 18 market.

The problem here is when the loss of life ratio is compared to the profit margins, it all becomes no more than statistics to these corporate pharmaceutical giants.
this link is to such a report, the article is from 2002:

http://www.counterpunch.org/giombetti0723.html

The article mentions that the children in question were Black and Hispanic. This adds an additional questionable element to an already bad situation. Somebody overstepped their authority in granting consent to these trials. Somebody will be in deep trouble, especially when the racial element is made clear - Tuskegee with babies, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

"According to documents, Glaxo has sponsored at least four medical trials since 1995 using Hispanic and black children at Incarnation."
...
"Normally, trials on children would require parental consent but, as the infants are in care, New York's authorities hold that role.

The city health department has launched an investigation into claims that more than 100 children at Incarnation were used in 36 experiments -- at least four of them co-sponsored by Glaxo."