[LINK] "Ebola outbreak: Africans understandably wary about promised cures"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC's Daniel Schwartz examines how, in the context of the expanding Ebola epidemic, African skepticism about foreign medical systems is often grounded in recent bad experience with said.

For example, in Nigeria in 1996, when a meningitis epidemic was underway, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer arrived in the hot zone in Kano. Its representatives immediately set up their clinic next to the makeshift tents of a hospital then staffed mostly by Doctors Without Borders.

Meningitis, an inflammation in a membrane surrounding the brain or spinal cord, affects mostly children, and without treatment, about half of those infected will die.

Pfizer had a new treatment that it wanted to test, so its doctors gave Trovan (floxacin) to about half the 200 children they treated, while the other half received an approved drug for meningitis.

About five per cent of the patients taking the experimental Trovan died, while some others were left blind, deaf and/or paralyzed.

In the aftermath, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to approve Trovan, hundreds of Nigerian parents sued Pfizer and the company eventually settled in 2009. (Its position was that it was the disease that had caused the deaths and other conditions.)

Pfizer claimed to have permission from the local hospital to conduct its experiment, but the approval letter was said to be a forgery. Pfizer claimed it had informed consent from the patients’ families but could not provide written proof.

Harriet Washington, who wrote about the Trovan case in her 2011 book Deadly Monopolies, told CBC News that in the absence of that consent, people in Kano "had no way of distinguishing the doctors who are giving approved drugs meant to work, from doctors right next to them who are giving them something experimental."