Infants die during clinical trials
NEW DELHI: As many as 49 babies, many of whom hadn’t even celebrated their first birthday, have died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, while being subjected to clinical trials for testing new drugs and therapies over the last two and a half years.
Responding to a Right to Information (RTI) query on clinical trials on babies, the AIIMS administration admitted that of the 4,142 babies — 2,728 of whom were below the age of one — who were enrolled for clinical trials by the institute’s department of paediatrics, 49 had died since January 1, 2006. The department conducted 42 sets of trials on babies during this period.
In its reply, AIIMS said the deaths amounted to a 1.18% mortality rate. The RTI query was filed by Rahul Verma of Uday Foundation for Congenital Defects and Rare Blood Groups, an NGO. Clinical trials are the final stage of research conducted to answer questions about safety and efficacy of vaccines, drugs and devices, new therapies and forms of care or new ways of using known treatments. Many of these trials are for foreign drugs.
India recently pipped China to become Asia’s most popular destination for conducting clinical trials. According to the Planning Commission, 139 new trials were outsourced to India recently compared with 98 in China.
Source : Times of India (more…)