New Charges Against Phizer in Nigeria

U.S. Government lawyers recently discovered new material related to their negligence case against Phizer Inc. As a result, they withdrew the original lawsuit on Friday-- but immediately filed a new one, which adds fraud charges on top of the original allegations. The new $7 billion civil lawsuit claims that Phizer deliberately side-stepped company safeguards to avoid obtaining consent from Nigerian families in order to test experimental drugs on children during that country's 1996 meningitis epidemic. As result of those drug experiments, some children died and many others were sickened further. Pfizer has denied all charges.

The civil case is in addition to a federal criminal case and separate from civil and criminal cases launched at the state level in the northern state of Kano. All the cases stem from the same mid-1990s drug study in Kano's main city, also called Kano.

According to the MSNBC report, Pfizer treated 100 meningitis-infected children with an experimental antibiotic, Trovan. Another 100 children, who were control patients in the study, received an approved antibiotic, ceftriaxone — but the dose was lower than recommended, the families' lawyers alleged.

Eleven children died — five of those on Trovan and six in the control group, while others suffered physical disabilities and brain damage. Pfizer has always insisted its records show none of the deaths was linked to Trovan or substandard treatment, noting that the study showed a better survival rate for the patients on Trovan than those on the standard drug. Meningitis survivors sometimes sustain brain damage or other complications from the disease.

Authorities in Kano state are blaming the Pfizer controversy for widespread suspicion of government public health policies, particularly the global effort to vaccinate children against polio. Islamic leaders in largely Muslim Kano have seized on the Pfizer controversy as evidence of a U.S.-led conspiracy. Rumors that polio vaccines spread AIDS or infertility spurred Kano and another heavily Muslim state, Zamfara, to boycott a polio vaccination campaign.

Vaccination programs restarted in Nigeria in 2004, after an 11-month boycott, but the delay set back global eradication programs. The boycott was blamed for causing an outbreak that spread polio across Africa and into the Middle East.