Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 23:36:17 -0600 (CST)

The Body Hunters: Overwhelming the Watchdogs 

By Mary Pat Flaherty, Deborah Nelson and Joe Stephens Washington Post

Staff Writers 

Monday, December 18, 2000 ; Page A01  

Second of six articles  

A global boom in overseas drug experiments is changing the way new drugs are tested on humans and approved for U.S. consumers as pharmaceutical companies shift to countries where regulations are looser, costs lower and trusting patients plentiful. Companies searching for lucrative drugs are turning abroad to hold faster human experiments, offering poorly paid foreign doctors handsome fees for every subject they recruit into tests that help speed drugs to market. In some cases, the companies test drugs deemed too risky to try out in the United States, a Washington Post investigation has found. The globalization of drug testing has resulted in a system increasingly dominated by profit incentives, where no single regulator can see the whole picture or inspect experiments effectively, according to interviews on five continents with doctors, health officials and patients. For Americans, it means some of the newest drugs on U.S. shelves are tested at sites far removed from U.S. regulators – sometimes in countries with few inspectors and little history of examining drugs for safety and effectiveness. 

See link for complete article...  

Thanks, Myrl, for sharing this article....