Lured, used and discarded

THAT day when Darla Dhanalakshmi suffered severe joint pain and numbness in the limbs she knew something was seriously wrong. She had been suffering from the pain since January after she visited a clinic on the outskirts of Hyderabad. There she was asked to pop an unknown pill. The pain got worse over time. On June 17, Dhanalakshmi, along with nine other women and one man from her neighbourhood in Adarsh Nagar slum, was taken to the Guntur district hospital. All of them had the same symptoms. Some of them were extremely weak and had difficulty in walking. The next day, four women from neighbouring Lenin Nagar slum were also hospitalised.

All of them said they had developed the complications after taking trial drugs. Alarmed district authority officials rushed to the settlements in Piduguralla town on June 17 itself. Known as the lime city of India, about 300 white cement factories operate in Piduguralla. Adarsh Nagar and Lenin Nagar are in the vicinity of these factories. Most people here are landless labourers and work in the lime kilns for a pittance of Rs 100 a day. The police arrested two women—Kommu Karunamma and Sheikh Jameela. They were brokers who provided “testers” to contract research organisation (CRO) Axis Clinical Laboratory in Miyapur on the outskirts of Hyderabad for testing the effectiveness of breast cancer drug Exemestane in Indian conditions.

Ethics on trial
Victims of vaccination
Trial by error
Human guinea pigs
Inhuman trials