SBS Dateline | Experimenting on India

Are US pharmaceutical companies using India’s poor as guinea pigs in sometimes deadly trials for new medicines?

A special investigation has found illiterate peasants have been given pills and injected without their informed consent, as clinical trials spread rapidly throughout the developing world.

Bhopal Hospital, built in the aftemath of the world’s worst industrial accident, has been the site of one trial. Residents thought they were being treated for the effects of the disaster.

Reporter Zeina Awad from Al Jazeera travels to Bhopal where locals say they had no idea they were part of a clinical trial. One Indian couple describe their daughter collapsing and dying after being given medication they knew little about.

Awad then grills corporate representatives and drug industry regulators in the US. The pharmaceutical companies remain tight lipped about their work, but the FBI has now launched an investigation into the pharmaceutical industry’s increasing reliance on overseas trials.

WATCH - Apologies, but this video is no longer available on the Dateline website for copyright reasons. However, you can still see the original version of the story on Al Jazeera's website.

VIDEO EXTRA - Zeina Awad talks more about her story, and why clinical trials are being conducted in markets where research subjects willl see little benefit.

REPLAY - See Dateline's recent report on 1940s US medical experiments in Guatemala, where people were intentionally infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea.