Women were denied proper screenings, claims IJME report
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A new report, published by the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), has shed light on a disturbing cervical cancer study in which a US-funded institute may have caused over 250 Indian women to die by denying them proper screenings, all for the sake of an experiment.
The report, entitled “US-funded measurements of cervical cancer death rates in India: scientific and ethical concerns,” says that the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partnered up on a study to investigate the effect of cancer screening on mitigating the risk of death from cervical cancer, for women from India. This study began in 1998, and lasted for 15 years.
According to Eric J. Suba, the report’s lead author, 224,929 women participated in the study; of those, 138,624 women were not allowed access to proper cancer screening. These women were then monitored as part of the study’s control group, to see if total lack of screening had any impact on the contraction and subsequent treatment of cervical cancer. The rest of the women were given one of two different types of screenings to see how those methods tested.
Unfortunately, 254 of the women in the control group have died as a result of their participation in the study, which forbade them from getting cancer screening that, ultimately, could have saved their lives.
In the report, Suba specifically fingers the US for delaying or outright denying potentially life-saving treatments to these women, all in the name of scientific advancement. But the researchers behind the experiment have said that the control group represented “standard care,” since most Indian women do not get screened for cervical cancer, and these women likely would not have, either.
“You can’t let people die to show something you already know,” says the report. “If, at any time during the past 15 years, the 138,624 women in the unscreened control groups had been told the simple truth that cervical screening would lower their risk of death from cancer, they would have left the control groups and sought screening on their own, thereby nullifying a scientifically defective experimental design.”
Suba is calling on the US agencies involved to reimburse all the families who have been victimized by the study. He is also calling for immediate screenings for all the control-group women still living, to make sure they don’t suffer the same fate as 254 of their colleagues.
“High-quality screening must be provided to all surviving unscreened women without further delay. US-based global health organizations should institutionalize a commitment to “improving health outcomes as rapidly as possible among as many people as possible.” Those who suffered avoidable harm and death, as well as their families, should be promptly and fairly compensated,” says the study.
The United States Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP) has already admitted that the study was unethical, and that the women used in the study were not given enough information to adequately provide informed consent. That statement, according to the report, contradicts several other bio-ethics institutions which sanctioned the study, indicating that the US government will likely implement measure to reimburse the affected families.
The full IJME report can be read here.