NSW: Doctors paid $6,000 to recruit patients for drug trials

AAP General News (Australia)
02-13-2001
NSW: Doctors paid $6,000 to recruit patients for drug trials

SYDNEY, Feb 13 AAP - Doctors are being paid up to $6,000 a head by pharmaceutical companies
to recruit patients for drug trials, which have risen 20-fold in Australia since 1990,
it has been claimed.

Intellectually disabled men and women are being included in the trials which are not
governed by adequate laws to protect participants' rights, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The chairman of the Australian Drug Evaluation Committee, Professor Martin Tattersall,
told the paper the protection of patient's rights in drug trials needed a major overhaul.

Patients were not being told that doctors were receiving money for them volunteering
for new treatments while in some cases they were not aware they were part of a clinical
trial, the paper said.

One experiment approved by the NSW Guardianship Tribunal involved putting intellectually
disabled people on an anti-epileptic drug which never succeeded in being registered anywhere
in the world.

The government watchdog body, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, was obliged to
directly review only two of the 1,712 clinical trials conducted in Australia last year,
the Herald investigation found.

AAP dmc/rs

KEYWORD: DRUGS

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