- Patients in Israeli hospitals, among them the elderly,
children and the mentally infirm, have been used as guinea pigs in medical
experiments without permission from their legal guardians, according to
the country's main government watchdog.
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- Geriatric patients had their fingers inked to give fingerprints
authorising the tests even though they suffered from senile dementia and
would not have known what they were doing.
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- Some children had their eardrums deliberately pierced
so that a drug, not approved for medical use anywhere else in the world,
could be applied. Such tests needed approval but the hospital did not apply
to the ministry.
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- In another case, a painful procedure using a needle to
draw urine from the bladder for testing was performed without the necessary
ministry approval.
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- Unlicensed drugs and invasive procedures were also used
on patients, sometimes by researchers who were not even doctors. In one
clear conflict of interest the researcher was employed by the commercial
company selling the procedure.
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- And even though any fatality during such clinical tests
should be reported to the ministry within 48 hours, it took researchers
more than a week to pass on the information in 21 out of 37 deaths. Some
took more than a month.
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- The image of helpless victims being experimented on is
especially sensitive in Israel because of the horrors inflicted on Jewish
prisoners of Auschwitz by its Nazi camp doctor, Josef Mengele.
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- The tests carried out in Israeli hospitals, however,
bear no comparison with the sadism of the man known as "the Angel
of Death".
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- The disturbing revelations shocked Dan Naveh, the country's
health minister, although he has been criticised for a lack of urgency
on the issue of medical testing. After eight years' work, a bill to control
experimentation is still not finished.
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- The findings filled more than half of the 106-page annual
report on Israel's health ministry drawn up by Eliezer Goldberg, the state
comptroller.
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- According to the Jerusalem Post, the comptroller found
the ministry guilty of negligence and carelessness in supervising the hospitals
where tests were carried out.
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- The paper reported that the violations were worst in
geriatric, rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals.
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- At the Harzfeld Rehabilitation Hospital, a 101-year-old
woman and a 91-year-old woman included in a medical trial signed consent
forms without a relative or a legal guardian giving written approval.
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- In other tests at the same hospital, seven patients "signed''
consent forms with only their inked fingerprint.
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- Israel is committed to following the 1964 Helsinki Declaration
on biomedical experimentation, a code of practice drawn up by the World
Health Organisation.
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- Israel's government ombudsman found routine abuses of
the Helsinki Declaration's principles at a number of hospitals across the
country.
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- The report also said that in some cases hospitals provided
insurance for the practitioners carrying out the tests but not the patients.
Existing guidelines say trial patients must be given adequate insurance.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessio
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