4 June 2007Yahoo! News
Nigeria filed a lawsuit Monday for seven billion dollars (5.2 billion euros) damages from Pfizer over a drug test in which about 200 children were either killed or deformed, court officials said.
The federal government suit says the children suffered various degrees of adverse effects ranging from deafness to muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight, slurred speech, while 11 died.
The federal action follows a similar suit filed last month by Kano, Nigeria's largest state, which is seeking 2.75 billion dollars from the pharmaceutical giant.
Both lawsuits centre around the events of April 1996, when the World Health Organization (WHO) and Pfizer volunteered to help in Kano following an outbreak of measles, cholera and meningitis that killed more than 3,000 people.
The Kano state suit alleges that Pfizer administered an untested drug called Trovan Floxacin without authorisation on almost 200 children infected with meningitis in the state.
The federal lawsuit echoes those charges.
"In the midst of the epidemic, Pfizer devised a scheme under which it misrepresented and failed to disclose its primary motive in seeking to participate in giving care to the victims of the epidemic," it alleges.
"Pfizer never disclosed that it intended to experiment on vulnerable victims or conduct any clinical trials without the necessary approvals from regulatory agencies in Nigeria but pretended it came to render humanitarian service."
The case was adjourned till June 26, 2007, for hearing.
In a statement released in response to the Kano state lawsuit last week, Pfizer denied the charges against it.
"Pfizer continues to emphasize in the strongest terms that the 1996 Trovan clinical study was conducted with the full knowledge of the Nigerian government and in a responsible and ethical way consistent with the company's abiding commitment to patient safety," said the statement.
"Any allegations in these lawsuits to the contrary are simply untrue -- they weren't valid when they were first raised years ago and they're not valid today," it added.
Preliminary hearings in the state lawsuit have been fixed for June 4.
