Dr Walterspiel set out eight grounds for opposing the trial including the fact that Trovan had not been tested
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Dr Walterspiel set out eight grounds for opposing the trial including the fact that Trovan had "not been tested for its sensitivity before the first child was exposed to a live-or-die experiment." His contract with the company was terminated soon after.Brian Woods, who made Dying for Drugs, met Meirelles and Le Carr?during the development of The Constant Gardener. "We had an entertaining lunch in which we were all frothing about the pharmaceutical industry," said Woods, who last week won a commission from Channel 4 to make a follow-up film.Meirelles, whose Brazilian background gave him a strong interest in the issue of first world/Third World exploitation, distributed copies of Dying for Drugs to cast members, and it had the desired effect. Trovan was not used in the US because it caused side effects including joint pain. It is impossible to tell whether Anas's knee problem was caused by the drug or was a consequence of the meningitis. Trovan was later withdrawn from the market for unrelated reasons, after it was linked with a number of deaths of patients from liver damage.But the case against Pfizer did not end there. Lawyers seeking damages for the children involved in the Trovan trial obtained a letter sent by Pfizer's childhood diseases specialist, Dr Juan Walterspiel, protesting strongly about it. Pfizer said it remained satisfied the Kano experiment was conducted properly.Since the trial, Anas has had a pain in his knee which X-rays showed was inflamed and which prevents him from running.
The card was numbered 0001 - Anas was the first.His story was told in the Channel 4 documentary Dying for Drugs, broadcast in 2003, which alleged that Pfizer had failed to obtain informed consent from the parents of the children tested, and had back-dated a letter granting ethical approval for the trial from the ethics committee of the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital. It chartered a plane to Kano with a new drug called Trovan that was a potential life-saver and a potential billion-dollar profit earner. But Trovan had never been tested on children.The Infectious Diseases Hospital in Kano was under siege from desperate parents who brought their dying children begging for help One of these was Anas, then aged six. His father, Mohammed, said his son was given a drug by "a doctor from overseas" and put to bed.
Mohammed assumed the doctors who treated his son were from M?cins Sans Fronti?, an independent medical organisation, who had arrived several weeks before the Pfizer team.Only later when he examined a card he was given did he realise that Anas had been included in a trial of the new drug Trovan. The infection spread quickly through the cramped slums of the city and within weeks thousands of children were ill.The outbreak was not reported in the West but it did not go unnoticed. An internet message alerted scientists at the research headquarters in Connecticut, of one of the world's biggest drug companies: Pfizer.The company reacted swiftly. The crimes of the pharmaceutical industry - from the price protection of Aids drugs which have denied life-saving medicines to millions, to the cover up of lethal side effects to protect profits - are well documented.But there are two cases in which named companies have been accused of wrongdoing that partly inspired The Constant Gardener and which give resonance to the allegations about the secret testing of drugs on the unsuspecting and the suppression of any negative findings.In 1996, Kano was suffering from outbreaks of cholera and measles when a third, even more deadly, disease arrived: meningitis. Who can say? But it is not necessary to posit such a gargantuan conspiracy, where paranoia is the only rational response. The film features two brutal killings, a savage beating, a campaign of harassment, intimidation and threats involving two governments and their security services - all to protect the interests of a pharmaceutical company that is testing a drug on mothers and children and quietly burying its failures.Maybe there are pharmaceutical companies that have engaged in such crimes and enlisted the support of corrupt governments.
Some will find The Constant Gardener's thesis overblown, but it is a gripping thriller, ravishingly shot by C?r Charlone, that conveys the chaos, grandeur and darkness of Africa with unequalled authenticity. After the credits roll, a note from John Le Carr?ppears on screen that reads: "Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this; as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard." This is hard to credit. At the centre of this conspiracy is the idea that pharmaceutical companies use African people to test drugs which are destined to become huge profit-earners in the West.It is not the first time such allegations have been made, but they have rarely been levelled with such dramatic effect.
So it is worth examining the background to The Constant Gardener. The film opens in a remote area of northern Kenya where Tessa Quayle (played by Rachel Weisz), the wife of a British diplomat, has been murdered. Her travelling companion, a local doctor, has disappeared, and the evidence points to a crime of passion.At the time of her death, Tessa, an activist and passionate campaigner, was on the verge of uncovering a conspiracy involving the testing of a new drug. In personality she was the opposite of her husband, the mild-mannered Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), whose chief passion is his plants - he is the gardener of the title.But in his grief, and goaded by whispers of her infidelity, he sets out to complete what she started, embarking on a quest to expose the truth about the pharmaceutical industry.What he uncovers, as the film's blurb puts it, is "a vast conspiracy, at once deadly and commonplace, one that has claimed innocent lives - and is about to put his own at risk".