Infants as Medical Guinea Pigs?

When Big Pharma wants a drug approved, ideally they should go through several stages of trials and tests, where the drug is tested for effectiveness and side effects before being approved. But what happens when the intended audience of the drug is children? Many children have been victimized by doctors prescribing adult drugs without knowing their effects on smaller and younger people, and it’s because of this that some are calling on drug companies to run more trials—this time on infants.

Newborns, according to experts, are a “underrepresented population” in the world of clinical drug trials. While pediatric drug studies are becoming more common, testing newborns remains rare for a variety of reasons -at least as far as the general public knows. And according to doctors of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the University of Cincinnati, and likely many more, this should change.

The idea behind drug trials is to test a pharmaceutical drug for dangerous side effects before it is approved. These tests are carried out in order to ensure prescription drugs are as safe as possible. That’s the ideal situation. But, as we’ve seen, these tests aren’t always done properly, nor are they always analyzed and reported accurately.

For example, last year the Department of Justice fined GlaxoSmithKline $3 billion for misreporting safety issues and illegal advertisement of some of their drugs. Among other things, the pharmaceutical giant didn’t disclose that their diabetes drug Avandia significantly increased the risk of heart attack.

Inaccurate and downright fraudulent medical studies are at “epidemic” proportions.

And now they want to subject infants to these flawed studies and hastily concluded drug trials.

“Of over 120,000 studies at the National Institutes of Health clinical trials repository, only 0.6% involves neonates; in total, only 3.4% of all registered pediatric studies involve neonates,” according to the Journal of Pediatrics. So, in their mind, the number of infants being used as lab animals should increase.

Yet another example of children being used as guinea pigs can be seen in the case involving Oxycontin, a heavy duty narcotic painkiller. Primarily to keep it’s drug patent, the maker of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma LP, decided to test the drug on children as young as six years old. By starting new trials on children, Purdue Pharma is able to extend their patent by six months.

If you’re someone to give your baby pharmaceutical drugs, even in the face of all the dangers associated with the creations, it would probably be best to have pharmaceutical drugs that were actually ‘proven safe’. And in order to prove these drugs safe, they would need to have been tested on children under similar circumstances. This is one reason why some individuals see drug-testing on children and infants as a ‘rational solution’. However, it’s clear this is just one morally questionable debate to add to those surrounding Big Pharma’s takeover of public health.

What do you think?

Additional Sources:

Journal of Pediatrics