Pfizer Kano Trial: 24 years after, some victims not compensated and still can’t live normal lives

ONE sunny afternoon in April 1996, Maryam Ibrahim, also known as Ladi, took Maryam Ibrahim Sulaiman, her six-year-old daughter, to the Infectious Diseases Hospital (IDH) in Kano for vaccination after the child had suffered severe headache and fever overnight.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9HdPss5CJM

Before dawn, the child’s situation became so severe that she could barely walk. Ladi strapped her daughter to her back and headed for the hospital.

The child was later confirmed by a female European doctor at the IDH to be suffering from Meningitis.

After giving her four rounds of injections, the doctor handed her a wristband and a whistle. She also took her photograph, and gave her mother a copy as gift. And the pink colour registration card was taken from her by the officials of the hospital.

Ladi was excited, especially as the treatment was done free of charge. But her excitement would later be short-lived because, what transpired at the hospital cast doubts on the treatment administered on the poor child.

“…On reaching there (IDH) I entered with Maryam and she was accepted immediately and they took her to a particular room,” she recalls during an interview with The ICIR.

“I peeped through the window where they laid her on a bench but when they discovered that I peeped, they let the curtain down, and as of then they’ve cut her open from the waist to fetch some fluid. I saw something like a TV connected with a cable on her, yes, I saw that. But after that I was not allowed to see anything again. Later they asked me to get a seat for myself, which I did.

“Later, I saw a staff held her by the neck and told me to follow so as to get a bed for her, and I did.

“All that I cared about then was my child’s health and well-being.”

Later, the hospital officials instructed her to come back with the child after a week for check up.

But during the week, the child began to feel chronic pain in the leg and waist region.

On the day she was asked to come back with her daughter, Ladi was amazed when she was told that the white doctor and her colleagues had gone back to their country.

A physician who witnessed the event said the doctors left Kano unceremoniously immediately after the treatment.

Ladi did not know that her daughter had been used as one of the 200 guinea pigs to test the efficacy of a vaccine manufactured by the United States-based pharmaceutical company, Pfizer.

Since then, Maryam has continued to live her life with complications arising from the treatment. Her problem include chronic waist and leg pains and incessant fever. Later, she started complaining of auditory problem, then dizziness, resulting in loss of balance.

The vaccine later affected the mobility of her waist and legs. So, she was being taken from one hospital to another administered with different injections and drugs, Ladi narrated.

It is not clear if the complications affected Maryam’s memory 24 years after but many of her answers to questions were incoherent and she seemed to have forgotten many things about herself.

The treatment, it seems, has changed her life and now all she desires is living a healthy life free of pain.

“Most time, she is sick and to play basketball with her fellow girls is difficult. She complained that some of her school mates poked fun at her and she tried to explain to them that her waist and legs are not strong enough” Ladi said, sadness written all over her face.

She eventually finished high school in 2012, after enduring years of crude jokes and verbal assaults from insensitive peers.

She could not continue with her education because her parents could not afford it. And she also could attract intimate relationships because of her poor health condition, her mother told The ICIR.

“Men are scared to marry her because of her intermittent sickness. And she can’t walk long-distance without feeling pain in her hips”.

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/pfizer-kano-trial-24-years-after-some-victims-not-compensated-and-still-cant-live-normal-lives/