the Washington Post has made damning discoveries on how foreign drugs firms, some of them based in the us , have been using African and Latin Americans as guinea pigs in testing risky drugs. The same paper had blown the lid on the administration of a drug, Trovan Floxacin, on Nigerian children in 1996, resulting in the death of 11 and the deformity of 200 others.

The report stated the incidents showed "how a poorly regulated drug testing had turned human beings into medical guinea pigs in Africa and other parts of the developing world.' "It is dominated by private interests, and the system often betrays its promises to patients and consumers experiments involving risky drugs proceed with little independent oversight. Impoverished, poorly-educated patients are sometimes tested without their knowledge,' the paper found out.

It also revealed that us based drug companies were paying physicians to test thousands of