Scientific disaster

It has been a sad week for medical science. The news today is filled with the story of six men who had volunteered to participate in a clinical trial of a new medicine. This drug has been designed to help people with leukaemia (blood cancer) and auto-immune diseases (where the immune system attacks a persons own body). Unfortunately something has gone wrong and these men have become seriously ill. Two of the men are close to death, with doctors involved in the case saying that it would take 'a miracle' to save them.

This sort of thing should not happen and usually does not happen. The BBC radio 4 news today said that only one death in a drug trial (in america) had occured in recent years. Every new medicine must go through an extensive, formalised series of tests before it will be used on a patient. Initially drugs are tried on human tissue in the laboratory, then animals, before being tested on healthy human volunteers in a Phase One clinical trial like this one. Most of the time toxic effects will be detected in tissue or animal trials. Phase One volunteers usually sit around and get paid a lot of money for doing nothing.

Doing nothing except risking their lives for medicine.

So, what went wrong? Was the estimated drug dose too high? Was the drug contaminated when it was prepared? Was there an unexpected side-effect of the drug that interferred with basic human physiological function? In a more paranoid forum, the suggestion that animal rights protestors would tamper with trial drugs has been made but I would find that to be totally unbelieveable.

I guess time will cast light on this problem. At present spare a thought for these men and their families. I just hope that they get better. I also have some sympathy for the doctors who were involved in these trials. Most of them are probably junior doctors involved in clinical trials as part of their hospital specialist training. Imagine how bad they must feel about themselves just now. They have given healthy young men a drug that may kill them. They would not have expected this to happed. These doctors probably had high hopes for this new medicine that could have improved and potentially saved the lives of thousands of patients in the future.

Science is dangerous.

Phunk


for more read

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4808836.stm