We Have Met the Terrorists and They Are US. --by Mick Collins
We Have Met The Terrorists and They Are US.
by Mick Collins
20 February 2005
[With recent media agit-props on the situation in Western Sudan by that now-familiar rep company of Human Rights loveys:
Nichodemus Kristof, of the NYTimes;
Samatha Power, of Harvard's New School of Geopolitical Role Reversal;
UN General Homeo Dallaire, of Quebec's always hoppin' 'Your Round, Eh, Froggie!':
Latte Annan, the UN's Tripp'n Fetchit;
and Colin Powell, Bush's first White House nigger;
--and mustn't forget the notable loan-outs, Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle, playing Knucklehead Smith to his Hotel Rwanda role model, Paul Rusesabagina's Jerry Mahoney: all bemoaning and bemoaning and . . . bemoaning the horrific raping and killing, eye gouging and live baby barbecuing, unto Genocide of the poor Christian and Animist Africans of Darfur by the demonic 'Arab hordes' of the Sudanese government and their dastardly Chadian (?) militia, the Janjaweeds.
Now, I don't mean to sound glib (Wait a minute! 'course I do.), but this is all too grimly familiar. It's a spin-off of another African horror series that the West didn't picked up on for more'n ten years:
The similar destruction of the Rwandan nation; one might even say, the destruction of the Rwandan Revolution. For between 1962 and 1989, Rwanda raised itself from the bottom to near the top of African standard of living through the ministrations of the popular governments of, first, Grégoire Kayibanda, then, from 1973, Juvenal Habyarimana, with their single party states, Kayiband's PARMEHUTU, then Habyarimana's MRND. In the last days of Rwanda, the majority MRND (whose constitution was based on that of North Korea) was in a Western-imposed power-sharing arrangement with several opposition parties, but even this compromise to Western 'Democracy' did not spare the country, after the international media-cached assassination of President Habyrimana, from the teenage mutant ninja Tutsis of Paul 'Kill 'em All and Let the UN Sort 'em Out' Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front bulldozing Rwanda into an off-ramp on the freeway from Southern Sudan, through Uganda, to a Congolese Costco for coltan and other strategic and precious minerals.
And of course there are innumerable parallels with the ongoing destruction of Sudan and those of Yugolsavia, Iraq, and Palestine: the targeted state is accused by the HRsters (Mad Ave make-overs of the Christian anti-Communist League, vulgarly, though accurately, referred to as 'Fascists') of terrorizing its own people or its neighbors, even of committing genocide against a particular national, ethnic or religious group (my latest fave, #1 with a Mossad bullet, is that the invasion of Iraq was really all about stopping Saddam's genocide of the White Kurds.), with no particular motive other than pure malice or a malignant love of power.
When the HR lobby has gotten its big, gnarly fist far enough up into the south end of the public's feeding tube that they're sure the media et alia will follow them anywhere, a Humanitarian catastrophe is declared, UN peacekeepers are sent in, and then the real killing can get started--this always includes a fair number of Blue Hats falling to 'friendly fire' without a peep. But since those being slaughtered are merely genocidaires (or their collabo wives and kids), since this is just another necessary battle in the endless war on terrorism, it's really no biggie. Like when was the last time you saw one of these Stop-The-Fucking-Genocide-types break a sweat over the 6-9 million dead innocents in the US/UK/UN-backed, Rwandan/Ugandan/Burundian-executed carve-up of Congo?
However, if one can but catch a glimmer of truth through this noxious Human Rights smoke and mirrors show--and if there's even a cunt-hair of decency left in that withered, putrescent and inert organ once known as our soul--it is impossible any longer to countenance the tyranny of unReason, of unReality that is daily exercised in places like Courtroom I at The Hague, where President Milosevic is delivering a livid testimonial to the dire history of his country for the benefit of not much more than the grotesque rictus of a vampiric Geoffry Nice or the empty periwigs of the Niarobi trio on the bench; or in Arusha, Tanzania, where The Hague's freakish UNSC twin, the ICTR, is daily entertaining false witnesses, culled from Kagame's concentration camps built next to US military installations in and around the Rwandan capital, Kigali, trying to save their own narra asses by snitching off those of their concitizens who had the courage or temerity to defend their friends and families, their nation, against a foreign invasion from Uganda and its subsequent four year reign of terror--from Uganda, certainly, but, to paraphrase Boutros Boutros Gali, a 100% US production.
So if it's all about terror and terrorism against Human Rights, then can you find the real terrorists in these pictures?
The 'Arab' Janjaweed? or the US-backed 'rebels' of John Garang's SPLA?
The 'Fascist and Racist' MRND? or the US-backed 'rebels' of Paul Kagame's RPF?
The 'Stalinist Fascist' dictator of Yugoslavia? or the US-back illegal secessionist militias of Tudjman's Croatia or Izedbegovic's Bosnia?
Who hit La Belle disco in Germany to make it look like a Lybian job?
Who assassinated the Iraqi scientist along with several patrons dining in a bistro on the rue Cupernic in Paris?
Who planned and executed the 93 bombing of the WTC?
Who blew up the Murrah Bldg in Oklahoma City?
Who, for 78 Spring days and nights in 1999, killed thousands of civilians while sowing nuclear filth throughout Yugoslavia, and now bases and trains its terrorist monstrosities in bases in Tusla, Bosnia, and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo?
Who demolished the WTC and hit the Pentagon on 911?
Who killed Raffiq Hariri?
Who is stoking the fires of war in Iraq? --Is it really just an artisanal People's Resistance to US imperialist occupation, or has Iraq, like the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia and Central Africa, been turned into a Free Fire Zone for the legions of Private Military Contractors who hire out to the large multinationals to help them blow up some of the enourmous overage of Western military (waste) production?
It's really a lot simpler than all this verbiage might lead you to believe: And below you'll find a somewhat solipsistic anecdote that pretty well nails just where the terror is coming from, and just who's collecting their commissions off it.
Grab Bag Q&A #1: What's a pile of rubble that once used to be twin NYC skyscrapers worth?
Ask Larry Silverstien, who held the lease on the WTC for just 6 weeks before 911--and has admitted on the video record to having ordered its demolition--just ask Larry and he'd contentedly tell you: $4.2 billion from 9 differnet insurers--$2.1 bn for each flying Molotov cocktail.
In the story below the question is, 'What's the value of a nameless 10 yr old African girl's life?'
The wages of terror are truly phat--make that fatal. --mc]
*********************************
Here's a little side-note on Iatrogenocide. [the bilingual play, surnommé 'Nitro', can be found below on the CM/P blog]
Pierre Bourdieu says that 'globalization' is not so much a
mode of economic organization as it is a rhetorical gambit
the West has concocted to justify the freeing of Capital
from all regulatory stress and allowing it to flow around
the world and valorize itself without any limits imposed by
social or societal (national) exigencies.
In the same way, AIDS is not so much a disease (those who
have looked even glancingly at this phantasmagoria know it
is not a disease at all but a categorie of, at last count,
29 quite old, familiar conditions) as it is a
reconfiguration of often fatal illnesses and their etiologies
to the end of freeing the medical/pharmaceutical complex to
impose an authoritarian control over the public health of
all the world--but especially the poor.
So, AIDS is the centerpiece of the medical mythology through
which the global privatization of public health is achieved.
That's kinda what Nitro is on about. And the following is
also kinda what Nitro is on about:
DRUG COMPANIES' TESTS IN POOR COUNTRIES RAISE ETHICAL
QUESTIONS
by Joe Stephens--Washington Post Service
Monday December 18, 2000
KANO, Nigeria -- By the time word of the little girl's death
reached the United States, her name had been replaced by
numerals:
No. 6587-0069
She was 10 years old and a scant 41 pounds (18.6 kilograms).
She lived in Nigeria, and in April 1996 she ached from
meningitis.
An epidemic raged and scores lay dying in this frenetic city
of amber dust. Somehow the girl found a refuge: a medical
camp where foreign doctors had arrived to dispense expensive
medicines for free.
Behind a gate besieged by suffering crowds stood two very
different clinics. A humanitarian charity, Medecins Sans
Frontieres, had erected a treatment center solely in an
effort to save lives. Researchers for Pfizer Inc., a huge
American drug company, had set up a second center. They were
using Nigeria's meningitis epidemic to conduct experiments
on children with what Pfizer believed was a promising new
antibiotic -- a drug not yet approved in the United States.
The experimental drug was a potential blockbuster: Wall
Street analysts said Pfizer might reap $1 billion a year if
Trovan, as it was known, won approval for all its potential uses.
Pfizer also wanted to test the drug for use against
meningitis, including an epidemic strain. The company could
not find enough patients in the United States, so its
researchers had come to Kano, among the dying.
Doctors working with Pfizer drew spinal fluid from the girl,
gauged her symptoms and logged her as Patient No. 0069 at
Testing Site No. 6587 in Experiment No. 154-149. They gave
her 56 milligrams of Trovan.
A day later, the girl's strength was evaporating, Pfizer
records show, and one of her eyes froze in place. On the
third day, she died.
Pfizer records are explicit. Action taken: "Dose continued
unchanged." Outcome: "Death."
Nobody can know for certain if the girl would have lived had
she been taken off experimental Trovan; perhpas she was
beyond all hope. Yet the circumstances of her death -- while
taking an unapproved drug, with alternative treatments at
hand, in a hurriedly established private-sector experiment
-- suggest much larger problems.
A Washington Post investigation into corporate drug
experiments in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin
America reveals a booming, poorly regulated testing system
that is dominated by private interests and that far too
often betrays its promises to patients and consumers.
Expriments involving risky drugs proceed with little
independent oversight. Impoverished, poorly educated
patients are sometimes tested without understanding that
they are guinea pigs. And pledges of quality medical care
sometimes prove fatally hollow, The Post found.
Drugmakers hop borders with scant government review. Largely
uninspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration --
which has limited authority and few resources to police
experiments overseas -- drug companies are
paying doctors to test thousands of human subjects in the
Third World and Eastern Europe.
The companies use the tests to produce new products and new
revenue streams, but they are also responding to pressure
from regulators, Congress and libbyists for disease victims
to develop new medicines quickly. By providing huge pools of
human subjects, foreign trials help speed new drugs to the
marketplace -- where they will be sold mainly to patients in
wealthy countries.
The Food and Drug Administration requires that patients in
such tests, no matter where they live, consent fully to the
experiments if the results are to be used to win marketing
approval in the United States. And, in fact, many tests
conducted in the Third World are conducted carefully and
serve to expedite the creation of lifesaving drugs. But The
Post's investigation found that in other instances the rules
are poorly enforced or ignored.
The experiments raise questions about corporate ethics and
profits on a frontier of globalization where drug companies
wield enormous influence, and where doctors paid by
"U.S.-based" corporations sometimes perform experiments on
ill-informed patients in authoritarian societies.
A Nigerian physician who said he was present during the Kano
experiment, for instance, felt it was "a bad thing," but he
did not object because Pfizer's test appeared to have
government backing.
"I could not protest," said the physician, Amir Imam Yola.
"The system you have in America and the system we have here,
there is a wide gap. Freedom of speech is still not here."
Industry guidelines for conducting meningitis experiments
never envisioned testing an antibiotic amid a terrible
epidemic in a squalid, short-staffed medical camp lacking
basic equipment.
Dr. George McCracken, a Texas pediatrician and leading
meningitis specialist who co-authored the guidelines, said
he was surprised that Pfizer's researchers had attempted
such a venture. "I just wouldn't do a study that way
myself," he said. "I know they wanted to get the data. They
wanted to go fast. They wanted to move ahead. I'm not sure
they made a smart decision."
Among the 200 stricken children enrolled in its experiment,
11 died and others suffered meningitis related symptoms such
as deafness, lameness, blindness, seizures and, in one case,
an inability to walk or talk, company records show.
Pfizer said its goal was to study the safety and
effectiveness of its antibiotic while simultaneously
pioneering a break-through treatment for the Third World.
The company contends that its practices were
validated--especially given the horrendous conditions it
found -- by the number of children who showed improvement
and by a fatality rate of about 6 percent, which compares favorably
with those reported for bacterial meningitis victims treated
at U.S. hospitals. The Trovan experiement, a company
spokeswoman said, was approved by a Nigerian ethics board
and was sound from medical scientific, regulatory and
ethical standpoints.
Pfizer researchers prepared the study over six weeks,
instead of the year or longer common in the United States.
And while American meningitis patients generally received
fast-acting intravenous medicines, the researchers gave most
of the Nigerian subjects an oral form of Trovan that the
company said had never been tested in children.
Ten doctors interviewed about Patient 0069's death --
including pediatricians, meningitis specialists and
physicians who have practiced in developing countries --
said they were troubled by her case. Their questions focused
in part on whether doctors left her on the test drug for too
long as her health declined. Generally if subjects are not
responding to an experimental treatment they are removed
from the test and given proven medicines.
Industry guidelines governing meningitis experiments urge
that researchers conduct a second spinal tap a day or so
after treatment begins to see if the medication is working.
Pfizer researchers chose to make such exams optional in
Nigeria and Pfizer said they did not perform one on Patient 0069,
leaving her on the experimental drug until her death.
"It could be considered murder," said Evariste Lodi, the
Medecins Sans Frontieres physician who led the charity's
efforts against meningitis in Kano, after he reviewed a
Pfizer description of Patient 0069's death. Added Agwu
Urondu, a Nigerian physician still working in the city: "The
patient died because the doctor refused to help."
In a written statement, a Pfizer spokeswoman said a death
such as Patient 0069's could occur during treatment with any
antibiotic and that researchers had no reason to suspect the
experimental medicine was not working.
Abdulhamid Isa Duise, a Nigerian doctor hired by Pfizer to
run the experiment, agreed that physicians should alter the
medication of a patient who is not improving. "To be very
honest, in retrospect, maybe we should have done something
about that," he said of the girl.
Dr. Yola and others who battled the epidemic said patients
did not understand they had been in an experiment. "The
patients did not know if it was research or not," agreed a
Nigerian laboratory technician who took part. "They just
knew they were sick."
Pfizer disputes that, saying that local nurses explained the
research to families, even though the company has no signed
consent forms to prove it.
Although Pfizer eventually won approval to sell the drug to
adults in the United States, in the end its push to bring
Trovan to market turned out badly. Authorities never approved
marketing the antibiotic for use by children in the United
States or Nigeria.
U.S. regulators discovered dozens of discrepancies in the
Kano test results. Last year, they advised doctors to restrict
Trovan's use in adults because patients had suffered liver
damage and death. European regulators suspended sales
altogether.
Pfizer's Nigerian clinic opened and closed in a relative eye
blink. About three weeks after the company's team roared in
with a chartered DC-9, the team roared out. Pfizer's doctors
returned once to examine the patients but did not track
their long-term recovery.
"If I had the power," said Dr. Lodi, who watched the
experiment unfold from across the compound, "I would take
away their medical licenses."
**********************
So, there's Africa again. In gratitude for letting the West
experiment on them, the World Bank is going to loan the sick
Africans $1 billion a year at 7%. Then they can buy some of
these quality pharmaceuticals--so the sick who survived the
experiments will mortgage their futures for the privilege
of suffering this kind of slow, painful death.
And you know what's happened in Hunan, in China, with Harvard
Med School and Millenium Pharmaceuticals' DNA/plasma harvests:
their bloddy pot luck transfusions giving just about everyone involved
some kind of immune disease. And now more and more of the people
of the old Soviet Union are dying younger and younger, and living more
and more miserably under the constant threat of Western-back political,
economic and military terrorism. And all that DU the US has spread
around the occupied world has caused cancer and birth defects to propigate
at heretofore unheard of rates.
So, who and where are the real terrorist? For openers, you could ask
your Doctor. If he says anything about the Arabs or the poor--or poor Arabs--
get another Doctor.
*******************************
And speaking of needing a Croaker: CirqueMinime/Paris is in a kinda critical condition--financially. We've always been good at raising money for others, but too proud to beg for ourselves--until now. Hell, CM/P doesn't even have a bank acct or a PayPal acct, or one of those machines to process credit cards.
So, if you want to see this little old circus keep pushing its wagons, loaded with clowns and freaks, on into new battles for Truth and Justice, please shoot off what ever you can spare to:
[$s or $ checks (made out to me, Mick Collins) to:]
c/o Montgomery
2497 Nakia Ct.
Durham, CA 95938
USA
or
[Euros or euro checks (likewise made out) to:]
Mick Collins
66, rue Marcelle
93500 Pantin
France
by Mick Collins
20 February 2005
[With recent media agit-props on the situation in Western Sudan by that now-familiar rep company of Human Rights loveys:
Nichodemus Kristof, of the NYTimes;
Samatha Power, of Harvard's New School of Geopolitical Role Reversal;
UN General Homeo Dallaire, of Quebec's always hoppin' 'Your Round, Eh, Froggie!':
Latte Annan, the UN's Tripp'n Fetchit;
and Colin Powell, Bush's first White House nigger;
--and mustn't forget the notable loan-outs, Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle, playing Knucklehead Smith to his Hotel Rwanda role model, Paul Rusesabagina's Jerry Mahoney: all bemoaning and bemoaning and . . . bemoaning the horrific raping and killing, eye gouging and live baby barbecuing, unto Genocide of the poor Christian and Animist Africans of Darfur by the demonic 'Arab hordes' of the Sudanese government and their dastardly Chadian (?) militia, the Janjaweeds.
Now, I don't mean to sound glib (Wait a minute! 'course I do.), but this is all too grimly familiar. It's a spin-off of another African horror series that the West didn't picked up on for more'n ten years:
The similar destruction of the Rwandan nation; one might even say, the destruction of the Rwandan Revolution. For between 1962 and 1989, Rwanda raised itself from the bottom to near the top of African standard of living through the ministrations of the popular governments of, first, Grégoire Kayibanda, then, from 1973, Juvenal Habyarimana, with their single party states, Kayiband's PARMEHUTU, then Habyarimana's MRND. In the last days of Rwanda, the majority MRND (whose constitution was based on that of North Korea) was in a Western-imposed power-sharing arrangement with several opposition parties, but even this compromise to Western 'Democracy' did not spare the country, after the international media-cached assassination of President Habyrimana, from the teenage mutant ninja Tutsis of Paul 'Kill 'em All and Let the UN Sort 'em Out' Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front bulldozing Rwanda into an off-ramp on the freeway from Southern Sudan, through Uganda, to a Congolese Costco for coltan and other strategic and precious minerals.
And of course there are innumerable parallels with the ongoing destruction of Sudan and those of Yugolsavia, Iraq, and Palestine: the targeted state is accused by the HRsters (Mad Ave make-overs of the Christian anti-Communist League, vulgarly, though accurately, referred to as 'Fascists') of terrorizing its own people or its neighbors, even of committing genocide against a particular national, ethnic or religious group (my latest fave, #1 with a Mossad bullet, is that the invasion of Iraq was really all about stopping Saddam's genocide of the White Kurds.), with no particular motive other than pure malice or a malignant love of power.
When the HR lobby has gotten its big, gnarly fist far enough up into the south end of the public's feeding tube that they're sure the media et alia will follow them anywhere, a Humanitarian catastrophe is declared, UN peacekeepers are sent in, and then the real killing can get started--this always includes a fair number of Blue Hats falling to 'friendly fire' without a peep. But since those being slaughtered are merely genocidaires (or their collabo wives and kids), since this is just another necessary battle in the endless war on terrorism, it's really no biggie. Like when was the last time you saw one of these Stop-The-Fucking-Genocide-types break a sweat over the 6-9 million dead innocents in the US/UK/UN-backed, Rwandan/Ugandan/Burundian-executed carve-up of Congo?
However, if one can but catch a glimmer of truth through this noxious Human Rights smoke and mirrors show--and if there's even a cunt-hair of decency left in that withered, putrescent and inert organ once known as our soul--it is impossible any longer to countenance the tyranny of unReason, of unReality that is daily exercised in places like Courtroom I at The Hague, where President Milosevic is delivering a livid testimonial to the dire history of his country for the benefit of not much more than the grotesque rictus of a vampiric Geoffry Nice or the empty periwigs of the Niarobi trio on the bench; or in Arusha, Tanzania, where The Hague's freakish UNSC twin, the ICTR, is daily entertaining false witnesses, culled from Kagame's concentration camps built next to US military installations in and around the Rwandan capital, Kigali, trying to save their own narra asses by snitching off those of their concitizens who had the courage or temerity to defend their friends and families, their nation, against a foreign invasion from Uganda and its subsequent four year reign of terror--from Uganda, certainly, but, to paraphrase Boutros Boutros Gali, a 100% US production.
So if it's all about terror and terrorism against Human Rights, then can you find the real terrorists in these pictures?
The 'Arab' Janjaweed? or the US-backed 'rebels' of John Garang's SPLA?
The 'Fascist and Racist' MRND? or the US-backed 'rebels' of Paul Kagame's RPF?
The 'Stalinist Fascist' dictator of Yugoslavia? or the US-back illegal secessionist militias of Tudjman's Croatia or Izedbegovic's Bosnia?
Who hit La Belle disco in Germany to make it look like a Lybian job?
Who assassinated the Iraqi scientist along with several patrons dining in a bistro on the rue Cupernic in Paris?
Who planned and executed the 93 bombing of the WTC?
Who blew up the Murrah Bldg in Oklahoma City?
Who, for 78 Spring days and nights in 1999, killed thousands of civilians while sowing nuclear filth throughout Yugoslavia, and now bases and trains its terrorist monstrosities in bases in Tusla, Bosnia, and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo?
Who demolished the WTC and hit the Pentagon on 911?
Who killed Raffiq Hariri?
Who is stoking the fires of war in Iraq? --Is it really just an artisanal People's Resistance to US imperialist occupation, or has Iraq, like the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia and Central Africa, been turned into a Free Fire Zone for the legions of Private Military Contractors who hire out to the large multinationals to help them blow up some of the enourmous overage of Western military (waste) production?
It's really a lot simpler than all this verbiage might lead you to believe: And below you'll find a somewhat solipsistic anecdote that pretty well nails just where the terror is coming from, and just who's collecting their commissions off it.
Grab Bag Q&A #1: What's a pile of rubble that once used to be twin NYC skyscrapers worth?
Ask Larry Silverstien, who held the lease on the WTC for just 6 weeks before 911--and has admitted on the video record to having ordered its demolition--just ask Larry and he'd contentedly tell you: $4.2 billion from 9 differnet insurers--$2.1 bn for each flying Molotov cocktail.
In the story below the question is, 'What's the value of a nameless 10 yr old African girl's life?'
The wages of terror are truly phat--make that fatal. --mc]
*********************************
Here's a little side-note on Iatrogenocide. [the bilingual play, surnommé 'Nitro', can be found below on the CM/P blog]
Pierre Bourdieu says that 'globalization' is not so much a
mode of economic organization as it is a rhetorical gambit
the West has concocted to justify the freeing of Capital
from all regulatory stress and allowing it to flow around
the world and valorize itself without any limits imposed by
social or societal (national) exigencies.
In the same way, AIDS is not so much a disease (those who
have looked even glancingly at this phantasmagoria know it
is not a disease at all but a categorie of, at last count,
29 quite old, familiar conditions) as it is a
reconfiguration of often fatal illnesses and their etiologies
to the end of freeing the medical/pharmaceutical complex to
impose an authoritarian control over the public health of
all the world--but especially the poor.
So, AIDS is the centerpiece of the medical mythology through
which the global privatization of public health is achieved.
That's kinda what Nitro is on about. And the following is
also kinda what Nitro is on about:
DRUG COMPANIES' TESTS IN POOR COUNTRIES RAISE ETHICAL
QUESTIONS
by Joe Stephens--Washington Post Service
Monday December 18, 2000
KANO, Nigeria -- By the time word of the little girl's death
reached the United States, her name had been replaced by
numerals:
No. 6587-0069
She was 10 years old and a scant 41 pounds (18.6 kilograms).
She lived in Nigeria, and in April 1996 she ached from
meningitis.
An epidemic raged and scores lay dying in this frenetic city
of amber dust. Somehow the girl found a refuge: a medical
camp where foreign doctors had arrived to dispense expensive
medicines for free.
Behind a gate besieged by suffering crowds stood two very
different clinics. A humanitarian charity, Medecins Sans
Frontieres, had erected a treatment center solely in an
effort to save lives. Researchers for Pfizer Inc., a huge
American drug company, had set up a second center. They were
using Nigeria's meningitis epidemic to conduct experiments
on children with what Pfizer believed was a promising new
antibiotic -- a drug not yet approved in the United States.
The experimental drug was a potential blockbuster: Wall
Street analysts said Pfizer might reap $1 billion a year if
Trovan, as it was known, won approval for all its potential uses.
Pfizer also wanted to test the drug for use against
meningitis, including an epidemic strain. The company could
not find enough patients in the United States, so its
researchers had come to Kano, among the dying.
Doctors working with Pfizer drew spinal fluid from the girl,
gauged her symptoms and logged her as Patient No. 0069 at
Testing Site No. 6587 in Experiment No. 154-149. They gave
her 56 milligrams of Trovan.
A day later, the girl's strength was evaporating, Pfizer
records show, and one of her eyes froze in place. On the
third day, she died.
Pfizer records are explicit. Action taken: "Dose continued
unchanged." Outcome: "Death."
Nobody can know for certain if the girl would have lived had
she been taken off experimental Trovan; perhpas she was
beyond all hope. Yet the circumstances of her death -- while
taking an unapproved drug, with alternative treatments at
hand, in a hurriedly established private-sector experiment
-- suggest much larger problems.
A Washington Post investigation into corporate drug
experiments in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin
America reveals a booming, poorly regulated testing system
that is dominated by private interests and that far too
often betrays its promises to patients and consumers.
Expriments involving risky drugs proceed with little
independent oversight. Impoverished, poorly educated
patients are sometimes tested without understanding that
they are guinea pigs. And pledges of quality medical care
sometimes prove fatally hollow, The Post found.
Drugmakers hop borders with scant government review. Largely
uninspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration --
which has limited authority and few resources to police
experiments overseas -- drug companies are
paying doctors to test thousands of human subjects in the
Third World and Eastern Europe.
The companies use the tests to produce new products and new
revenue streams, but they are also responding to pressure
from regulators, Congress and libbyists for disease victims
to develop new medicines quickly. By providing huge pools of
human subjects, foreign trials help speed new drugs to the
marketplace -- where they will be sold mainly to patients in
wealthy countries.
The Food and Drug Administration requires that patients in
such tests, no matter where they live, consent fully to the
experiments if the results are to be used to win marketing
approval in the United States. And, in fact, many tests
conducted in the Third World are conducted carefully and
serve to expedite the creation of lifesaving drugs. But The
Post's investigation found that in other instances the rules
are poorly enforced or ignored.
The experiments raise questions about corporate ethics and
profits on a frontier of globalization where drug companies
wield enormous influence, and where doctors paid by
"U.S.-based" corporations sometimes perform experiments on
ill-informed patients in authoritarian societies.
A Nigerian physician who said he was present during the Kano
experiment, for instance, felt it was "a bad thing," but he
did not object because Pfizer's test appeared to have
government backing.
"I could not protest," said the physician, Amir Imam Yola.
"The system you have in America and the system we have here,
there is a wide gap. Freedom of speech is still not here."
Industry guidelines for conducting meningitis experiments
never envisioned testing an antibiotic amid a terrible
epidemic in a squalid, short-staffed medical camp lacking
basic equipment.
Dr. George McCracken, a Texas pediatrician and leading
meningitis specialist who co-authored the guidelines, said
he was surprised that Pfizer's researchers had attempted
such a venture. "I just wouldn't do a study that way
myself," he said. "I know they wanted to get the data. They
wanted to go fast. They wanted to move ahead. I'm not sure
they made a smart decision."
Among the 200 stricken children enrolled in its experiment,
11 died and others suffered meningitis related symptoms such
as deafness, lameness, blindness, seizures and, in one case,
an inability to walk or talk, company records show.
Pfizer said its goal was to study the safety and
effectiveness of its antibiotic while simultaneously
pioneering a break-through treatment for the Third World.
The company contends that its practices were
validated--especially given the horrendous conditions it
found -- by the number of children who showed improvement
and by a fatality rate of about 6 percent, which compares favorably
with those reported for bacterial meningitis victims treated
at U.S. hospitals. The Trovan experiement, a company
spokeswoman said, was approved by a Nigerian ethics board
and was sound from medical scientific, regulatory and
ethical standpoints.
Pfizer researchers prepared the study over six weeks,
instead of the year or longer common in the United States.
And while American meningitis patients generally received
fast-acting intravenous medicines, the researchers gave most
of the Nigerian subjects an oral form of Trovan that the
company said had never been tested in children.
Ten doctors interviewed about Patient 0069's death --
including pediatricians, meningitis specialists and
physicians who have practiced in developing countries --
said they were troubled by her case. Their questions focused
in part on whether doctors left her on the test drug for too
long as her health declined. Generally if subjects are not
responding to an experimental treatment they are removed
from the test and given proven medicines.
Industry guidelines governing meningitis experiments urge
that researchers conduct a second spinal tap a day or so
after treatment begins to see if the medication is working.
Pfizer researchers chose to make such exams optional in
Nigeria and Pfizer said they did not perform one on Patient 0069,
leaving her on the experimental drug until her death.
"It could be considered murder," said Evariste Lodi, the
Medecins Sans Frontieres physician who led the charity's
efforts against meningitis in Kano, after he reviewed a
Pfizer description of Patient 0069's death. Added Agwu
Urondu, a Nigerian physician still working in the city: "The
patient died because the doctor refused to help."
In a written statement, a Pfizer spokeswoman said a death
such as Patient 0069's could occur during treatment with any
antibiotic and that researchers had no reason to suspect the
experimental medicine was not working.
Abdulhamid Isa Duise, a Nigerian doctor hired by Pfizer to
run the experiment, agreed that physicians should alter the
medication of a patient who is not improving. "To be very
honest, in retrospect, maybe we should have done something
about that," he said of the girl.
Dr. Yola and others who battled the epidemic said patients
did not understand they had been in an experiment. "The
patients did not know if it was research or not," agreed a
Nigerian laboratory technician who took part. "They just
knew they were sick."
Pfizer disputes that, saying that local nurses explained the
research to families, even though the company has no signed
consent forms to prove it.
Although Pfizer eventually won approval to sell the drug to
adults in the United States, in the end its push to bring
Trovan to market turned out badly. Authorities never approved
marketing the antibiotic for use by children in the United
States or Nigeria.
U.S. regulators discovered dozens of discrepancies in the
Kano test results. Last year, they advised doctors to restrict
Trovan's use in adults because patients had suffered liver
damage and death. European regulators suspended sales
altogether.
Pfizer's Nigerian clinic opened and closed in a relative eye
blink. About three weeks after the company's team roared in
with a chartered DC-9, the team roared out. Pfizer's doctors
returned once to examine the patients but did not track
their long-term recovery.
"If I had the power," said Dr. Lodi, who watched the
experiment unfold from across the compound, "I would take
away their medical licenses."
**********************
So, there's Africa again. In gratitude for letting the West
experiment on them, the World Bank is going to loan the sick
Africans $1 billion a year at 7%. Then they can buy some of
these quality pharmaceuticals--so the sick who survived the
experiments will mortgage their futures for the privilege
of suffering this kind of slow, painful death.
And you know what's happened in Hunan, in China, with Harvard
Med School and Millenium Pharmaceuticals' DNA/plasma harvests:
their bloddy pot luck transfusions giving just about everyone involved
some kind of immune disease. And now more and more of the people
of the old Soviet Union are dying younger and younger, and living more
and more miserably under the constant threat of Western-back political,
economic and military terrorism. And all that DU the US has spread
around the occupied world has caused cancer and birth defects to propigate
at heretofore unheard of rates.
So, who and where are the real terrorist? For openers, you could ask
your Doctor. If he says anything about the Arabs or the poor--or poor Arabs--
get another Doctor.
*******************************
And speaking of needing a Croaker: CirqueMinime/Paris is in a kinda critical condition--financially. We've always been good at raising money for others, but too proud to beg for ourselves--until now. Hell, CM/P doesn't even have a bank acct or a PayPal acct, or one of those machines to process credit cards.
So, if you want to see this little old circus keep pushing its wagons, loaded with clowns and freaks, on into new battles for Truth and Justice, please shoot off what ever you can spare to:
[$s or $ checks (made out to me, Mick Collins) to:]
c/o Montgomery
2497 Nakia Ct.
Durham, CA 95938
USA
or
[Euros or euro checks (likewise made out) to:]
Mick Collins
66, rue Marcelle
93500 Pantin
France
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 9:29 AM
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