Nigeria court seeks 3 arrests in Pfizer drug trial

Reuters reports that the Nigerian government has ordered the arrest of three Pfizer defendants in the Trovan antibiotic trial conducted in 1996.

Pfizer is charged with killing 11 children in that unethical, illegal drug trial, and leaving at least 189 severely disabled--blind, deaf, paralyzed and brain damaged.

The Nigerian government is seeking $7 billion and the Kano state government (where the trial took place) is seeking another $2 billion.

The company has evaded judicial review for more than a decade. It is hoped that at last the facts of that lethal trial will be aired in open proceedings and justice will be served.

_____________

----------------------------------------------------------
Nigeria court seeks 3 arrests in Pfizer drug trial

Mon 24 Dec 2007, 15:13 GMT

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN454820.html

KANO, Nigeria (Reuters) -

A Nigerian court on Monday ordered the arrests of three of the defendants in a trial over a drug test conducted by Pfizer in 1996 which Nigerian authorities say killed 11 children and left others disabled.

The northern state of Kano is suing Pfizer for $2 billion in damages and pressing criminal charges over the testing of the antibiotic Trovan on children in Kano during a meningitis epidemic that killed 12,000 children in six months.

The federal government is suing for an additional $6.5 billion and also pressing criminal charges.

Pfizer denies accusations that Trovan harmed children and that the company did not obtain proper regulatory and parental approval. It says it was meningitis that killed the children or damaged their health, while Trovan saved lives.

The High Court in Kano on Monday held a hearing in the state's criminal case against Pfizer.

Lawyers for Pfizer were present but Judge Shehu Atiku complained that individual defendants should have been there too and issued arrest warrants against three of them.

Pfizer is arguing in a separate process in a Lagos court that the defendants were not properly served criminal summons and therefore were not technically charged or obliged to appear in court.

The civil and criminal cases launched by the state and federal governments since May have developed into a tangle of unresolved petitions and side issues, dragging on from one adjournment to the next. No witness has been heard and no substantive issue tackled.

Atiku adjourned the Kano state criminal case to January 29 to hear a motion in which Pfizer challenges the court's jurisdiction.

C Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.