West drug firms conducted tests on humans in E Germany: Report
Major Western drug companies carried out tests on East German citizens during the Cold War era, a report says.
The report released on Tuesday revealed that the tests were carried out for 75 companies from 16 countries, from West Germany, Switzerland, France, the United States and Britain. Some of the big names involved in the tests are Bayer, Pfizer and Roche.
According to the report by Berlin's Charite university hospital, 320 clinical trials were carried out in the 1980s on people in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
A research team led by medical historian Volker Hess found evidence of up to 900 studies by these firms using East Germans between 1961 and 1990, the year Germany reunified.
The Western companies took advantage of the cash-strapped regime’s need for hard currency as well as chronic drug shortage in the former GDR, the report said.
However, Hess noted that the tests conducted appeared to have been in line with the standards and laws of the time, noting that practices in the West were also more lax in those days.
In 2013, Der Spiegel news magazine published a report stating major Western drug companies used more than 50,000 people in the former East Germany as "human guinea pigs" for some 600 clinical trials, including for blood pressure and depression drugs, in the 1980s.
It said many had been unwitting participants and some even died as a consequence of the tests -- charges disputed in the findings.
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