Capitalist Big Pharma Conducted Drug Experiments In Communist East Germany

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WhatInThe

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It's been coming out that Big Pharma including Pfizer, Bayer & Roche conducted drug experiments on East Germans during the Cold War. The government gave them access to their health system for money. Tests ran from 1961-1989. Supposedly they used standard practices.

http://www.thelocal.de/20160315/western-firms-tested-drugs-on-hundreds-of-east-germans-in-cold-war

Issues include capitalist companies doing business with a communist enemy,using patients in/from a totalitarian government in which they had little recourse and/or less scrutiny or regulation of the companies conducting the tests.
 

Even though they were supposedly conducting tests using accepted practices wouldn't the results be skewed because using someone from a society with a different diet, stresses, living conditions etc? Scientifically is that the best way to prepare to sell a drug in a completely different market? I hope the patients/system got free medicine if the stuff worked.
 

Let's not forget thalidomide, first thought to be synthesized by (variously) the Nazis in the '40's, German firm Grunenthal in the '50's and the German CIBA (later CIBA-Geigy) in the '50's, and given to Canadian, European, Australian and Asian women to counter morning sickness, instead producing horrific birth defects ...

The wheel continues to turn to this day.
 
SifuPhil said:
Let's not forget thalidomide, first thought to be synthesized by (variously) the Nazis in the '40's, German firm Grunenthal in the '50's and the German CIBA (later CIBA-Geigy) in the '50's, and given to Canadian, European, Australian and Asian women to counter morning sickness, instead producing horrific birth defects ...

The wheel continues to turn to this day.
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My guess is that the US had tighter controls on drugs back then as compared to those countries which allowed it's use. I wonder if European drug firms ran undisclosed tests on US citizens.

Just a side note. I always heard the steroids were first used by the communist countries in the late 50s. I'm wondering if the recipe for steroids back then was part of a side agreement for allowing them to test there.
 
WhatInThe said:
My guess is that the US had tighter controls on drugs back then as compared to those countries which allowed it's use. I wonder if European drug firms ran undisclosed tests on US citizens.

Just a side note. I always heard the steroids were first used by the communist countries in the late 50s. I'm wondering if the recipe for steroids back then was part of a side agreement for allowing them to test there.
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No need to wonder the US was busy conducting their own hidden drug testing and other experiments on humans. I doubt this sort of thing was limited to just the Germans or the US. Sadly, now they do it legally, by handing out samples and or recommending the lasted drug from the pharmaceutical company to a patient.
 
AprilT said:
No need to wonder the US was busy conducting their own hidden drug testing and other experiments on humans. I doubt this sort of thing was limited to just the Germans or the US. Sadly, now they do it legally, by handing out samples and or recommending the lasted drug from the pharmaceutical company to a patient.
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Pfizer got caught testing in Nigeria in 1996 less than a decade after the experiments ended in East Germany.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073001847.html
 
Tests on East Germans began in '61...I'd say that was about ten years after they were told they had to stop testing on people incarcerated in US prisons.
 
Maybe not 'experiment' but plain carelessness?

In late July, 2013, the FDA issued a powerful "black box" safety warning for a drug which has been taken by hundreds of thousands of troops to prevent malaria. The drug is called mefloquine, and it was previously sold in the U.S. by F. Hoffman-La Roche under the trade name Lariam. Since being developed by the U.S. military over four decades ago, mefloquine has been widely used by troops on deployments in Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We now recognize, decades too late, that mefloquine is neurotoxic and can cause lasting injury to the brainstem and emotional centers in the limbic system. As a result of its toxic effects, the drug is quickly becoming the "Agent Orange" of this generation, linked to a growing list of lasting neurological and psychiatric problems including suicide.

The public had its first glimpse of the mefloquine suicide problem over a decade ago in 2002, when a cluster of murder-suicides occurred among Ft. Bragg soldiers returning home from deployment. All three soldiers had been taking mefloquine, yet an official Army investigation later concluded mefloquine was "unlikely to be the cause of this clustering." The Army Surgeon General even testified to Congress there was "absolutely no statistical correlation between Lariam use and those murder suicides."

The next year, in 2003, a spike in suicides in the early months of the Iraq war was linked in media reports to widespread use of mefloquine; in response, the U.S. Army promised a study "to dispel Lariam suicide myths." Yet when mefloquine use was halted in Iraq in 2004, the active duty Army suicide rate fell precipitously.

Earlier this year, I analyzed data from an investigation of suicides in the Irish military conducted by the Irish network RTÉ. In my analysis, troops prescribed mefloquine had a 3 to 5 fold increase in their risk of suicide in the years following deployment, as compared to similar troops deployed but not prescribed mefloquine. The conclusions from this analysis seemed clear: mefloquine was a strong risk factor for suicide.

Drug regulators seemed to agree: soon after broadcast, Roche updated the Irish Lariam product information, warning the drug could cause suicide, suicidal thoughts and self-endangering behavior. Most importantly, Roche eliminated previous language that claimed that "no relationship to drug administration has been confirmed."

Yet these observations only confirm what should have been apparent all along. Mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and psychosis, are known to be strong risk factors for suicide. And since 1989, when mefloquine was first marketed in the U.S., the product label has clearly warned that the drug could cause symptoms of mental illness, including anxiety and depression, and hallucinations and other psychotic manifestations. Since mefloquine increases the risk of mental illness, and mental illness increases the risk of suicide, it follows logically that mefloquine increases the risk of suicide.

We now recognize that mefloquine can even occasionally cause a true dissociative psychosis. In a grip of such a terrifying psychosis, victims have jumped from buildings, or shot or stabbed themselves in grisly ways reminiscent of scenes from M. Night Shyamalan's film The Happening.Those who have survived mefloquine's psychotic effects describe experiencing morbid fascination with death, eerie dreamlike out-of-body states, and often uncontrollable compulsions and impulsivity towards acts of violence and self-harm.

As frightening as its intoxicating effects can be, mefloquine's dangers may not go away even when the drug is discontinued. Today's mefloquine product information warns of "serious, long-lasting mental illness" and psychiatric symptoms that can "continue for months or years after mefloquine has been stopped." Unfortunately, until recently, prominent authorities denied this was even possible. Clear the drug from your system, they insisted, and behavior would return to normal.

As a result, troops home from a mefloquine deployment, suffering from persistent dizziness or memory problems, insomnia, vivid nightmares, irritability and other changes in mood and personality caused by the drug have struggled to make sense of their lasting symptoms. Some of these veterans have even been diagnosed with PTSD or TBI.

But some veterans, including those without traumatic exposures or who had never suffered a concussion, in whom these lasting symptoms couldn't be easily explained, were accused of malingering or of having a "personality disorder". In some cases, these troops were discharged without medical benefits and left to fend for themselves. It should not be surprising to learn that some of these mefloquine veterans, mentally injured, confused, and cast out by the military that unwittingly poisoned them, would later take their own lives in desperation.

In 2004, the military was strongly encouraged to conduct careful studies to evaluate the role of mefloquine in suicide, but these studies were never done. In light of the FDA's black box warning, fulfilling this long overdue recommendation should now be a priority.

Yet conducting such studies shouldn't be necessary for today's military leadership to acknowledge what follows logically from today's science: Mefloquine, a neurotoxic drug that can cause permanent brain injury, is contributing to our unprecedented epidemic of mental illness and suicide. We must do more to reach out to veterans suffering in silence from the drug's toxic effects, and ensure that those at risk of suicide understand how the drug has affected their mental health. As importantly, mefloquine veterans need to have affirmed by the military what they have suspected all along: that they are not crazy, and that it really is the drug that is the cause of their symptoms.

We owe it this generation of veterans to recognize the neurological and psychiatric effects of mefloquine neurotoxicity alongside PTSD and TBI for what they are: the third signature injury of modern war.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-rem...b_3989034.html
 
Fortunately, thalidomide's horrifying effects were much less, in the U.S.

In the U.S., representatives from Chemie Grünenthal approached Smith, Kline & French (SKF), now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with a request to market and distribute the drug in North America. A memorandum rediscovered in 2010 in the archives of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shows that, as part of its in-licensing approach, Smith, Kline and Frenchconducted animal tests and ran a clinical trial of the drug in the United States involving 875 people, including pregnant women, in 1956–57.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] In 1956, researchers at SKF involved in clinical trials noted that even when used in very high doses, thalidomide could not induce sleep in mice.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] And when administered at doses 50 to 650 times larger than that claimed by Chemie Grünenthal to be "sleep inducing", the researchers could still not achieve the hypnotic effect in animals that it had on humans.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] After completion of the trial, and based on reasons kept hidden for decades, SKF declined to commercialize the drug. Later, Chemie Grünenthal, in 1958, reached an agreement with William S Merrell Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, (later Richardson-Merrell, now part of Sanofi), to market and distribute thalidomide throughout the United States.[SUP][4][/SUP][SUP][dead link]
[/SUP]The U.S. FDA refused to approve thalidomide for marketing and distribution. However, the drug was distributed in large quantities for testing purposes, after the American distributor and manufacturer Richardson-Merrell had applied for its approval in September 1960.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] The official in charge of the FDA review, Frances Oldham Kelsey, did not rely on information from the company, which did not include any test results. Richardson-Merrell was called on to perform tests and report the results. The company refused and demanded approval six times, and was refused each time. Nevertheless, a total of 17 children with thalidomide-induced malformations were born in the U.S.[SUP][45][/SUP]
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