Poor Indian women paid — then cheated — to take part in illegal drug trials

Not long after the Drug Controller General of India (DGCI) censured nine pharmaceutical companies for failing to compensate people harmed in the course of drug trials, women in Andhra Pradesh have come forward with a story that they were not only offered cash to take part in illegal drug testing, but also cheated out of the money they were owed.

The clinical tests on human beings, reportedly without the requisite permission of the state government, came to light on Thursday when some of the victims fell seriously ill in Piduguralla town, the Times of India reports. Many of those who returned from the lab after the tests developed acute joint pains, swelling in arms and throat infections.

"Though the pharma company promised to pay us huge amounts before conducting the tests, they paid me only 9,000," the paper quotes one of the alleged test subjects as saying. The firm did not provide any information to the women on the nature of tests conducted on them, the paper said.

The TOI quoted unnamed sources as saying that the people selected for the clinical trials are `detained' in the lab for four days. According to the women, they came across people from north Indian states also in the lab. "But we were strictly not allowed to interact with others," a woman revealed. Most of the women who went from Piduguralla are farm workers and wage laborers.

Estimated as a $400 million business in India — and growing fast — clinical testing has come under increasing scrutiny for possible ethical violations over the past year, following an NGO probe into a test of a new vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) conducted by the international NGO PATH with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

The probe alleged that researchers did not properly obtain "informed consent" from the parents of the research subjects — who were adolescent girls — and in many cases relied on "consent by proxy" from school officials. Subsequently, a government report termed these violations "minor deficiencies" after concluding that the deaths of the seven girls who died during the study were not related to the vaccine injections they received.  

Critics claim that one phrase — minor deficiencies — speaks volumes about the regulators' and industry's attitude toward patients' rights.