MORE than a thousand women were left untreated with cervical cancer in a 12-year experiment by India's Council of Medical Research, it is alleged today.

According to a report in New Scientist, the women all had pre-cancerous lesions of the type treatable by simple sur-gery when they are picked up by cervical smear tests.

However, the IMCR wanted to find out how quickly these cell growths developed into cancer, so the 1100 women were left untreated. As a result 69 of them developed cancer, and in nine of these the disease spread throughout the body.

The study was carried out between 1976 and 1988, but the report claims that Western drug companies and research institutes are still using Third World citizens as human guinea pigs in ways that would be prohibited in Europe and the US.

The emergence of new therapies for HIV have contributed to growing unease about the nature of drugs trials in developing countries.

One such trial in Zambia - cited in The Herald in November - had been submitted to an ethical committee in Lusaka by an American research institute after being refused ethical clearance in the UK because it was thought not to be safe.

In another cited by New Scientist, mothers in Africa with HIV were treated with the anti-viral drug AZT to determine if it would curb the transmission from mother to child.

The trial - carried out by the US National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Studies - entailed some of the women receiving a placebo instead of the real drug.

This, says the report, was after it had already been established that a three-month course of AZT during pregnancy cut maternal transmission by two-thirds, so that there was no justification for having an untreated control group.

Mr Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Re-search group, estimated that around 1000 African babies will be born with HIV because during the trial their mothers received only the placebo.

The researchers argued that it was vital to determine if a shorter course of AZT would be effective, since the $800 course of treatment would be too much for many countries.

At the heart of this argument is the irony that many of these trials are for drugs from which people in Third World countries will never benefit because they are too dear.

Mr Michael Grodin, professor of medical ethics at Boston University and a former adviser to the World Health Organisation, told New Scientist: ''Most of the trials done in the developing world are not ethical. You shouldn't do research in these countries unless the population is going to benefit from it. But in most cases they don't benefit.''

It has become a major contention whether trials should be permitted if a treatment that proves effective is discontinued at the end of them.

Human rights groups say it is wrong that when a trial ends treatment is stopped, a licence obtained, and the drugs marketed at a price beyond the reach of the people who risked their health testing them.

The debate surfaced in the British Medical Journal last month when Dr Peter Wilms-hurst, a British cardiologist, wrote: ''If they don't benefit from the findings, poor people shouldn't be used in the research.''

The head of the UK Medical Research Council's paediatric HIV clinical trials unit, Ms Di Gibb, is among those who believe it is unethical even to start a trial if the treatment is unlikely to be available to the whole population.

''In some of these countries we should be asking whether the results are even relevant,'' she says.

However, support for this view is not universal in the Third World itself. South Af-rican patient advocate groups responded to the BMJ debate by pointing out that drug trials may be the only hope patients have of getting the drugs at all - and that even the few months of healthy life they provide are better than none.

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