CLINICAL TRIALS have become a threat to the lives of poor people. An incident of this kind came to light recently in Adarshnagar colony, Pidugurallu, a town in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. A number of people who took part in the clinical trials suffered from different kinds of ailments, but could not afford treatment for the same.
The people of this colony are all below poverty line, which enabled these organizations to lure them with money in return for their lives. With the help of these organizations multinational pharmaceutical companies are able to do trails on human beings by spending much less money than is usually required for doing so, eventually putting their lives at risk. The subjects taking part in these trails should volunteer with full knowledge of the trail and get some money in return for the job. Also the research organizations are responsible for the safety of their subjects.
Unfortunately, the victims of this recent scam were innocent enough to be unaware of the post effects of the trails done on them. Poverty, illiteracy, ignorance became the factors driving them to accept the deal for petty amount of few hundreds. The existence of the ethical committee, which is supposed to take care of the health, safety and dignity of the subjects has become namesake. Every clinical trial that takes place has to be done with approval of this committee, but there are a lot of private trial sites in India which carry out their activities without the consent of the committee.
In this scenario, the most deplorable thing is that the Drugs and Cosmetics Act formulated in 1940 is still implemented in India. Even more unfortunate is the fact that there is no concrete law for the regulation of these clinical research organizations. Since there is no appropriate law, it has become difficult to take action against these CROs. It’s high time the government opens its eyes and come to the rescue of weaker sections of the society.
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