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Testing Drugs on India's Poor
theodp writes to tell us Wired is reporting that a lot of medical research firms are using India's poor as a hot test bed. From the article: "The sudden influx of drug companies to India resembles the gold rush frontier, according to Sean Philpott, managing editor of The American Journal of Bioethics. 'Not only are research costs low, but there is a skilled work force to conduct the trials'"
In all seriousness though, it is the US poor who volunteer to praticipate in research studies here too. I have one friend who paid her way through college doing this.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
In fact, this is one of the biggest problems in our current medical knowledgebase. Many important drug and poison studies have been conducted in India due to its unique mix of being technologically advanced enough to manage a study, structured enough to organize them, and having a large body of people willing to join them.
The big downside is that India is not an ethnically diverse country. Thus, the results are not necessarily transferrable.
Back in the '50s and '60s, the PCB studies were performed in India. PCBs were found to be highly toxic. It wasn't until the '70s and '80s that followup studies identified the fact that PCBs are vastly (as in 100x type vastly) more toxic to people of Indian and Japanese descent than to people of Caucasion and African descent. If the studies had been done in South America, America, Canada, or Europe, we'd probably still be using PCBs all over the place.
It is critical for the further advancement of medicine that we move beyond our current statistical approach to medicine and studies and start defining which genetic and environmental factors are indications or contraindications for specific medicines. Many medicines kill some people and save others. Rather than tossing them aside, we must start learning to identify when they will kill and when they will save. That requires tests across diverse populations. India doesn't qualify.
Sadly, abusing the underprivileged and poor for medical reasons occurs more frequently than one would think. For example, in addidtion to drug testing, during surgical residencies, most of the interns learn new procedures on the homeless or poor that in the hospital. Residents have to learn techniques somehow, and they are inevitably going to deliever sub-par results the first few times of doing something. Thus, the practice of using the underprivileged as "test-dummies" is unstated but widley accepted. Ideas for solutions to this moral dilemma?
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Comment was a dig at PeTA. PeTA hates humans.
c a_arson_terrorist(8-7-03).htm/. cfm/oid/21/
http://www.stopanimaltests.com/
If you want to be an animal rights activist, there is the legitimate organization called the ASPCA http://www.aspca.org/
They have been around for over 130 years.
PeTA is a bunch of wackjob veggie hippies that hates humans and are considered terrorists.
http://www.naiaonline.org/body/articles/archives/
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview
Yeah it's all the corporations fault. If it wasn't for them doctors would go out of their way to make medicines that worked without needing to be tested on animals or humans, right?
It's interesting to see that the same people who support the ecoterrorism by the Animal Liberation Front which has crippled our ability to test drugs on animals are now complaining about the ethical issues of testing drugs on people in India. If only we lived in one big socialistic world, people wouldn't get sick and need drugs, right?
It is obviously the corporations fault. Their love of profits make them test life-saving drugs on people instead of doing the decent thing and going out of business (giving their drugs to noone). If only they knew that their profits are what make people sick in the world.
Lack of diversity during certain phases is a good thing. It improves the signal to noise ratio in the statistics. It's why they use identical white mice. It's a bad move, when you extrapolate. Which is what someone did in your example. Luckily they erred on the safe side. Still, a good study should move from the narrow to the broad.
In general, humans are pretty genetically uniform. But some crucial differences do pop up. Heck, think of testing something as benign as dairy products. Most of the world can't drink milk.
Fun bit o' trivia: a significant number of chemicals that cause cancer in rats, don't in mice. And visa versa. Makes you wonder how reliable those tests are extrapolated to humans!
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Sometimes it makes me wish we'd let the South win the civil war. They could live in backward redneck-land and the rest of the country could get on with evolving the species.
Outstanding! One is rarely treated to such a display of irony: a sweeping, uninformed, all-inclusive condemnation of a huge swath of the country, contending that they, what... are losers because they make sweeping, uninformed judgements about things?
I don't suppose you've met any of the loony hardcore Catholics from New England? Or perhaps some Mormons from the upper-Rockies area? Or maybe some urban Baptists from, say, Philadelphia? Or perhaps some addled-brained Wiccan Nitwits from Seattle? Or maybe some Orthodox Jews from downtown NY,NY? There are people with retro-silly sensibilities all over this country, and always have been. New England is still infested with Puritans. No amount of MTV or porn spam seems to cure it.
On the other hand, I've met some of the most literate, gracious, science-informed, fundy-allergic, down-to-earth people in the world south of the Mason-Dixon Line. On balance, they're often considerably more rational and forward-thinking than some of the culture-rot-population I've met lurking in a lot of the northern cities. I'm just as tired of urbane, metrosexual pseudo-intellectuals who think that hydrogen is a new energy source being hidden by the government as you are of the hillbilly that thinks he's been abducted by aliens because he drank too much cough syrup.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.