"Are patients here more vulnerable?" asks Brijesh Regal, CEO of the New Delhi-based firm Apothecaries, which runs clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. "Obviously. They're poor. They're illiterate." Nonetheless, he argues, most of the problems can be attributed to the growing pains of a new industry. He points to the thalidomide fiasco in the 1950s - women who were given the drug for morning sickness delivered children with severe birth defects - as evidence that every developing industry has problems. "Why are we so concerned about India?" he asks. "If problems happened everywhere else, they will happen here. We are a massive country without a lot of regulatory infrastructure."I had expressed myself upon another Wired news article on the same topic, over here.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
The Dark Side of Business
Wired News writes upon another booming outsourcing industry in the article A Nation of Guinea Pigs. Here's the dark side:
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2 comments:
Many of these practices are unethical because either consent is never obtained from people on whom testing/trials are done or because the consent obtained in invalid.
It does have a lot to do with people being ignorant , that is those who are made victims of such practices , due to lack of regulations in most South Asian countries, and yes, of course the fact that because there are so many people in India, every human life is just perceived as a number. That is why 200 people dying in a bomb blast there does not make as much impact as 56 people dying in London tube bombings.
Today it is South Asia, yesterday it was South America. The reason why these regions are targeted is very evident.
Very true. I think the long term solution to lowering such exploitation lies in spread of education.
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