Transcripts For DW Close Up 20240713

The suspended head of psychiatry is now a suspect for months romanian investigators were wiretapping her hospital. As in 5 years so in 2 cases it looked like well in one of the cases i was glad that he made it. You know that he survived it i mean there were some pretty serious side effects. Yes the ones in the study were going to continue with them until the end. Yes ok illegal drug tests a scandal in the heart of europe and on the controls of failed 100 percent loss this extreme case violates all of the boundaries and regulations that ive ever seen documented to. A psychiatric unit in romania was used as a test lab for drug studies of International Pharmaceutical companies some funded with german taxes. The psychiatric unit in question is in the romanian city of our ride on the hunt carrion border. It has 70 beds 7 wards into isolation rooms. For years medication was allegedly tested here on mentally ill people without their consent or knowledge. In june 26 team criminal investigators arrested the head of the clinic daily a put day. She is now standing trial yet many questions remain unanswered and much Background Information is missing. I would like to attend the court room hearing but im not allowed in the hearing is taking place income or on a glance at the information board reveals something surprising the pharmaceutical firms who commissioned the studies are the aggrieved party in the lawsuit. The patients who received the drugs in the experiments have only been summoned as witnesses and are not allowed to be present in the court. Many of them still dont know to this day which drugs were administered to them by the clinic had daily a put down. Patients such as an initial warrant for. New food after me and a lot of yes she gave me some drugs but i dont know what she gave me i didnt know what they were cooled i didnt feel bad when i took them though. I later discovered that the investigators are convinced that her signature was forged on the pay. Consent form. I also met marina others andrina in the corridor of the court who invited me back to her home. Psycho pharmaceuticals were tested on her too this woman has bipolar disorder sometimes she feels on top of the world other times shes deeply depressed she remembers one occasion when she felt suspicious about her medication. Numbers what i read on the packet experiments alexandrina. And i thought this isnt right. When i read those words experiment alexandrina i said this isnt good he beat me. Before a new drug is authorized for the market it has to be tested on humans in a clinical trial. Either pharmaceutical companies or Research Institutes known as sponsors commission these studies. The sponsor often appoints sub contractors called Contract Research organizations to run the study. The Principal Investigator usually a physician coordinates the implementation of the trial on site. This was the psychiatric clinic leader daily up a day. In spite of my conversations with marina alexandrina and on the show are a token i managed to make no further progress. Like many other patients they dont know what happened. Im not allowed to enter the hearing and daily update refused an interview. But someone somewhere heard about my research and i managed to obtain 270 pages of files containing witness statements from daily up a day as close a staff many of them incriminate their boss today. Some even admit to being involved in for. Signatures. The espionage operation has enabled criminal investigators to hear live her daily up a day and her colleagues forged a patients signature. Yes heres a pen which i think you can give it to me ill do it then we can get rid of it. Shall he look here did you signature try to yes. Yes yes but look here in this little box down here he had some kind fate i dont know yes im next of kin stand your next of kin from here. You are whats your name. I worked through the files with my translator silvio das cob they concern 9 clinical studies between 20142016. According to the files studies commissioned by the following pharmaceutical companies and sponsors were carried out in our clinics menow p. F. Abra suka ferrer orion and the European Research cooperations you lust and optimize. Could they have known about the abuse taking place in the psychiatric clinic and. Do they hold themselves partly responsible we have all the Companies Involved none of them feels responsible let alone complicit but who is to blame. The list of charges is long the patient consent forms turned out to be forgeries patients were given test medication they should never have received due to their illnesses and side effects were covered up just is the clinic head daily up a day or solely responsible for all of this. With or from the book regarding the patient Marianna Illich i know for a fact that she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as. She was removed from the study because her symptoms were simple. To. The size economy that means that marianna elica should never have been given the test drug. Due from you know the number her symptoms got worse she develops new unpleasant symptoms. Then they try to the alleviate her by giving her more tablets. You know exactly which were not allowed in order to the protocol i was with. But its obvious they later tried to manipulate the documents to see and does so id say so. Marianna illich is one of the most dramatic cases in the files we wanted to know how she is now. She lives with her husband on the outskirts of araa in a tiny apartment where theres only just room for a bed. And we have visitors from german t. V. Its about the day of trial. She has a form of schizophrenia but the prosecution claims she was given a test drug that didnt match her illness her condition deteriorated show us your arm. This is going to be too it hasnt healed properly is that from your fault. Yes she fell far i tell you the 2015 study was a disaster she gained weight and attempted suicide again. After jumping out of the window marianna was readmitted to the psychiatric clinic the. Person my wife had no energy to live she could walk she threw herself out of the 2nd floor. Who. Then they wanted to put her up stairs in the ward and the doctor said no water in the basement. And so then she was in the basement for 3 days in 3. Investigators assume the patients condition worsened because of a clinical trial. That stings what do you think about doctor put a test of the drugs on you how do you feel as a human being. With a 3rd only its terrible and i have no sympathy for her they changed my treatment and i didnt feel good and i almost fell down the stairs and i said to her doctor what have you done have you changed my medication. She said were only human sometimes we make mistakes too. The meeting with marianna elect her left a lasting impression. She trusted her doctor and took the medicine. But the voices in her head got louder almost driving her to her death. The illegal drug tests in our road may have even cost human lives. Criminal investigators recorded a conversation between a physician and a colleague in the psychiatric ward. Holds them to the following came from the records i havent measured as a Blood Pressure to. Have been hard to come to talk and i havent measured his Blood Pressure today i have to speak to monica so that she can do it. He was really pale today he hasnt slept for 3 nights its a good thing i managed to persuade the professor to take him off the study without too much trouble i was really shocked. Yes 10 think about it too much x. 300 sick he could die here. Yes so it isnt the way it happened with god or you know when. Its just because i dont know what happened with me i dont know i dont know if you were there at the time i dont think you were it wasnt which he was that. He was someone else died then. I think i said you know which study it was he was screaming in the basement nobody gave a damn about him and then he dined in the basement with. My guards vitals that was in 2013 you know it was then. I dont know anymore. The patient who died in the clinic may have been the participant in a german study in my research i came across a study called switch at the time of his death in 2013 it was commissioned by a professor from munich. I moved to from boise and a professor of psychiatry from to ensure theres a teacher in munich germany. Professor lloyd researchers and teaches at the t u munich in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy. The federal ministry of education and Research Funded his study which tested a schizophrenia treatment on patients to the tune of around 1500000 euros according to the final report one participant did actually die during the study not due to the study medicine but allegedly due to blood poisoning yet how reliable is this information from the clinic in our. 2 years later another psychiatric patient died at 1st her death was covered up criminal investigators believe. Daily update claimed that the woman had traveled to france but in fact she died in romania the patient was allegedly given an antipsychotic test drug made by the pharmaceutical manufacturer atsuko but she should have never received this drug criminal investigators say her illness should have excluded her from the study. We met her cousin one of her last relatives at the patients grave in a suburb of our road. And im on our own on. The arms you how did you find out about her death ya the neighbors told me that it smelt it was it had been a few days. Yeah apparently it was a heart attack. I dont know what she was doing there but she fell and it smelled bad and it knew it was in june he says hes even so how do you feel about the suspicion that she might have died in connection with this medication. That somehow. Were now i dont feel good about it. Im always very worried especially when they do experiments on humans. My list i get it in there because theyve been there you trust duct is you think theyll cure you and then they kill you. But theyre criminals if they did those things to people thats not allowed. You can even do that with an animal. According to the criminal charges manufacturer suka paid around 180000. 00 euros today earlier today or to conduct a study during which Ramona Bowden died public prosecutors in romania estimate that around 90 study participants were affected by the manipulations daily update on the money for every study and every patient. How did this go undiscovered for so long. Romanian authorities are supposed to be responsible for controls. Are there signs of corruption. I went to meet a renowned expert in clinical studies. Professor get on to this used to teach at the university of fribourg in germany i showed him my Research Results and asked him for his assessment. Was open up with and on look at the controls or failed 100 percent this extreme case violates all of the boundaries and regulations that ive ever seen documented. The question is always did the controls fail or were the conditions formulated in such a lax manner that there were in fact no controls. A romanian sub contractor called clinics keeps appearing in the wiretap transcripts today i received several offers from them on the phone. Thats going well we start a new one on monday and another next week we shouldnt ever do it but we could stretch to 2 a week as you say to that Michael Mitch is asking you to do it because he trusts you shocked he said he could name you as a coauthor in publications what good. Could i might like to do you need that dont you of course i do. Why is it so important for researchers to publish how can it be an instrument to corrupt people saying look you can be a coauthor in this or that magazine. With you if you dont because its certainly a toxic development that distorts things. A few publications or a cornerstone of a normal academic career and theres enormous competition. Can open many doors so its very tempting to do things that youre not actually allowed to do particularly in countries where corruption is stronger and patients are poor or sometimes theres no health insurance. All of these mechanisms can come together and create a kind of perfect storm and then total catastrophes like this can happen. So far as i dont buy his abuse using. As a subcontractor clinics was often the connection between the sponsors of the studies and the head of the psychiatric clinic daily update. One of their telephone calls is about the dropout rate obviously too many patients had to be removed from the study. And i took a look because i was curious. There were a lot of side effects to a very strong the patients had to be admitted to hospital. But in 2 cases it looked like well one of the cases i was glad that he made it. That he survived it i mean. We have to make sure that we keep the subjects who are still in the study otherwise romania could drop out of the study completely were risking the whole project. Studies with this kind of dropout rate of course is too high it wont be valid of course. At clinics at least staff knew about the life threatening side effects but instead of breaking off the study more pressure was exerted to keep as many patients as possible in the study. I wanted to find out more about clinics so i traveled to bucharest. I found the headquarters deserted from this office the firm worked for pharmaceuticals producers all over the world organizing clinical studies and with german taxpayers money. It was also involved into European Research projects. We tracked down the former head of clinics in a tenement block. I confronted him with transcripts from the wiretap. But what can i say its our job to ensure that the studies are conducted quickly thats our task but arent you responsible for the safety of the patients they knew nothing about the study. We cant even check whether the signatures are genuine or false by the way these things happened in germany to do you know the german professor stefan launched in munich i think there were forged patient signatures and is switched to. Another mention of this switch study now in connection with allegedly forged patient signatures. Does professor lloyd know about the abuse of patients in our and his study is not being investigated in romania. According to the website which has since been deleted the professor was also the medical advisor to clinics and published Research Articles with daily upon data. He refused an interview i traveled to munich and asked again for information i got another rejection. In the end he sent a written reply. He doesnt give any statement regarding the allegedly forged signatures and. He is aware that serious charges have been made against professor put a by the romanian judiciary on account of several cases of Research Misconduct in studies. Concerning his study he writes the results of the studies have yet to be published and will be done so without the data from today a center. This is a clear contradiction as the study has already been completed and be farmed the German Federal institute for drugs and medical devices. The federal institute writes the farm has a copy of the final report and also a report on the death which occurred in the Romanian Center in our audience 2013. Regarding the study and the federal institute writes that it has no option to supervise Clinical Trials in another member state. In light of this the farm has no information at its disposal regarding possible forgeries of patient signatures. Romania is a member of the e. U. The Eastern European country seems to be particularly attractive for sponsors pharmaceutical manufacturers and researchers with. The Human Rights Organization public eye has been focusing on drug tests in Eastern European countries. I went to zurich and switzerland and was met by patrick duration and his colleague alice kohli. Its really cool right. Ill tell you 3 reasons why romania is popular the 1st is lots of people have no daily access to life saving medication. They see a study as a chance to get hold of western medication. The number one reason. Number 2 is the price. Wages are lower the infrastructure is no doubt cheaper. And the 3rd reason is the sponsors and firms. Theyre interested in getting the study conducted as fast as possible because then they gain time and time is money. So this is much here are the evaluations of the individual studies. We can see the names of the patients the next of kin serious side effects those who should have not been included in the study these are my notes from all the files. Such a large number with so many problems regarding patient consent is really incredible. And it seems very aggressive yes because these are poor people who are also mentally ill. These are all through that means they may not even be in a position to give their consent. They need to have a relative present. Distance mr. Zentai the Drug Companies really be aggrieved party. We think the sponsors have a clear responsibility they decide where to conduct the study and know that the study participants are vulnerable. For us this means that the sponsor has a duty of care. If they carry out a study in this environment they need to check 2 or 3 times if necessary at the test persons are also protected. Because they have a special responsibility for the us. There seems to be an urgent need for a transparent and public clarification of the pharmaceutical scandal in our road in particular any connections between daily up a day and possible accomplices. I arranged an appointment with the presiding judge in r. And i wanted to know why no patients are involved in the case as joint plaintiffs and why is the hearing taking place behind closed doors. This was if you as the alleged victims have not filed any lawsuits. That it may be this is a wiser decision in financial terms to wait and see who is guilty and then claim damages. Which is true in this case the court has decided to limit the public right to information in terms of what happens during proceedings. All data such as diagnoses and the patients disease progression this is all confidential information. The fact is that the psychiatric patients i met during my research are poor and in. Formed and helpless its hard to imagine that they would one day be capable of suing the head of the clinic particularly as none of them knows whats going on in the courtroom because the case is in camera none of the information reaches the public. My romanian colleague mihai to dhaka thinks theres a good reason for that. He used to report in detail on the scandal in his town. We dont have any leverage to. Let the audience the people know whats actually going on or what what what what theyre talking about i dont think that its for the protection of the witnesses or the victims i think its only for the protection of the Big Pharma Companies which we all know we have a lot of money and leverage is to paul and strings so the public does not go so this trial does not go public. This is bucharest for over a year now romanians have been back on the streets demonstrating. In their view the state is not doing enough to fight corruption in all areas. Unfortunately governed by its been a corrupt visions and this is the reason that were in here to let them know that we are watching them. This corruption important to the protesters but in which its the chinese that its probably the main reason most people garson demonstrates that people know the feel and see that the government doesnt care about them but only about themselves and their own interests and covering up their own intrinsics. The. Corruption especially in the Romanian Health care system is still highly topical today and under constant criticism from the. You which makes it all the more astounding that the head of a European Research project which conducted studies in araa wrote to me that shed never heard about any corruption in romania. The former psychiatric patients of daily up a day have seen no justice up to now. Many of them arent even aware that their suspected victims of a crime. Participant good or get ill each or almost died in his study. This is either you know whether drugs were tested on you or not i didnt take any they just gave me normal ones and so on you never signed a consent form and no i didnt sign anything i dont know maybe i just didnt realize. Or to remember for my. Unsuspecting psychiatric patients exploited for medical experiments controls which failed completely physicians who willingly took the risk of Vulnerable People getting harmed and those responsible only daily a pull data is appearing in court. No verdict has been reached so far and no investigations of other potentially responsible parties are under way. If a pharmaceutical scandal like this is subject to so little scrutiny it could strike again any time. At. Eco india. From plastic waste. To crude oil. Till indian entrepreneurs have turned their countrys waste problem. Good businesses their plants transforms into high quality eco friendly feel. 30 minutes. Chicago crime wave. Theres been an explosion of violence in americas 3rd largest city. In some parts of town right or fighting over territory innocent bystanders are caught crossfire. Many local residents say its time to stop the bloodshed. Chicago. In the 75 minutes. He takes it personally. With all of the wonderful people in stories that make the game so special. For all true fans. More than football longline. This is news on top stories. Thousands of firefighters are battling blazes across california a new fire broke out in West Los Angeles on monday forcing residents to flee their homes worst affected area is the Sonoma County in Northern California more than 200000 people there and the evacuation orders