ANKARA- There would be 893 people who die in Turkey every year due to the experimentation of pharmaceutical companies. This was announced by the English newspaper independent, which from its pages denounces the pharmaceutical giants, guilty of having killed nearly nine hundred Turks in 2010 alone.
Turkey holds sixth place in this bitter ranking. First place goes to India with 1,700 confirmed deaths, but pharmaceutical trials to date have claimed 120,000 victims.
The British newspaper's thorough investigation revealed many gruesome details about the experiments, including "there have been abuses” as a result of disinformation towards the “guinea pigs”; mostly illiterate citizens who need to raise liquidity.
Pfizer, Bristol Myers, PPD, Squibb, Amgen, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Quintiles, Merck KGaA, Sanofi-Aventis and Wyeth are just some of the best-known companies conducting such experiments. Naturally, experimentation is strictly regulated in England and the USA, where the pharmaceutical companies come from, and therefore these companies prefer to conduct it abroad where the technical-ethical standards have fewer legal constraints.
In India, the Minister of Public Health Ghulam Nabi Azad, underlined how 10 companies, which had continued these experiments within the aforementioned nation, had paid compensation of just over two thousand and five hundred euros to the relatives of only 22 victims. Naturally, the reimbursements paid are clearly less than the damage and above all they have not affected all the "human guinea pigs".
But Turkey claims the country is one of the "more regulated”, on pharmaceutical trials and the Turkish Ministry of Health said that each experiment was supervised by the authorities.
But the Dr. Cankat Tulunay head of the Clinical Pharmaceutics Foundation stressed that the investigations were led by people with limited knowledge and little expertise. Tulunay further warned that if this continues, Turkey could lose thousands of citizens precisely because of these experiments, which he continues to define "not regulated”.
