Yoshie and others,
Whenever you see a dangling m or l at the end of a link that's wrapped
because of margins, type it in when you paste the URL.
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11939-2000Dec15.html
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.
Experiments 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 Food and Drug Administration – which has limited authority and few
resources to police experiments overseas – U.S.-based 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
lobbyists 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 FDA 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 life-saving 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.
> >**********
> >
> >Meanwhile some other Doctors in cahoots with the Pharma.
> companies are using
> >the global south for drug testing.
> >
> ><http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/onassignment/theBodyHunte
> rs/index.ht
> >m>
>
> The link didn't work for me. Can you post the article or at least
> the highlights of it?
>
> I think that medical doctors should be subjected to neither M-C-M'
> nor the workerist & idealist argument that they should grow potatoes,
> cut sugar canes, dig ditches, etc. so they learn the "dignity of
> manual labor." Medicine is in practice a good example of a
> combination of mental & manual labor.
>
> Unfortunately, in actually existing for-profit medicine, the medical
> profession has been organized hierarchically: specialists; general
> practitioners; nurses; midwives; orderlies.
>
> What might a socialist reorganization of health care labor look like?
>
> Yoshie
>
