How’s it going all of you most amazing people?
I’m your host Landon Dowlatsingh and welcome back to another most amazing video.
A clinical or drug trial is used to explore whether or not a treatment or device is safe
and effective for humans.
For people who are strapped for cash, this might seem like an attractive option to earn
quick money.
However, there are a lot of negative side effects and complications with clinical trials
so let’s take a look at the top 10 drug trials that went horribly wrong.
Starting us off in at number 10 with The macular degeneration clinical trial.
This one is actually pretty recent.
So in January 2017, three women who were suffering from an eye disease known as macular degeneration
decided to participate in a stem cell clinical trial.
They each paid $5000 to have both of their eyes treated.
They entered the study with their vision and left blind.
This was a very unsafe and illegitimate clinical trial and now these poor three woman are left
without their eyesight and they will never recover from this.
Gene therapy drug trial slips into number 9.
Jesse Gelsinger was 18 years at the time when he participated in a drug trial that ended
his life.
He was injected with a drug that was developed as a treatment for infants who were born with
a severe form of liver disease.
They wanted to test safety of the procedure but sadly four days later, he had multiple
organ failure and brain death.
The university was sued for a wrongful death and they settled with the family for an undisclosed
amount of money.
Number 8 takes us over to the Elephant man drug trial.
Eight healthy young men signed up to participate in a routine drug trial at a London hospital
in exchange for 2,000 pounds.
They thought that this was an easy way to earn some money and they were told that the
most common and worse side-effects that they would experience are migraines or nausea that
would pass within a couple of hours after taking the drug.
Well they were sadly mistaken because six of them were left screaming in agony fighting
for their lives as their organs began to fall.
Some of them had to have their limbs amputated and one of them spent four months in the hospital
after suffering from heart, liver and kidney failure.
The Johns Hopkins asthma trial comes into number 7.
One healthy volunteer died after she inhaled a drug in a federally financed asthma drug
trial.
When she first inhaled the medicine, she only had a slight cough but then as time went on,
she had to be put on a ventilator because her lung tissue was breaking down and her
kidneys were starting to fail.
She died one month later and it was found that the drug used in this trial was not FDA
approved and this information wasn’t included in the consent form so Johns Hopkins had to
take full responsibility for this tragic death.
Number 6 brings us to an Anti-anxiety drug trial.
In January of 2016, a pharmaceutical company recruited 128 healthy volunteers to participate
in a clinical trial for a new drug that was developed to combat reduce anxiety that was
related to cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
When the dosages of this drug were increased, six of the participants became ill and they
were rushed to the emergency room.
One of the patients was a young man who was pronounced brain dead just two weeks after
he started the clinical trial.
The other five people were in a stable state but doctors predict that they have suffered
from irreversible brain damage that will cause some mental impairments.
Leukemia drug trial takes number 5.
In July of 2016, three adult leukemia patients tragically died after they participated in
a clinical trial where they were given an experimental drug called CAR-T.
The three patients died from cerebral edema which is swelling in the brain and now this
pharmaceutical company is being reviewed by the FDA and it is unclear whether or not they
will be able to carry on with future clinical trials.
Moving into number 4 with an Antipsychotic drug trial.
A 26 year old man who was mentally ill participated in a clinical trial for an anti-psychotic
drug called Seroquel.
But just six months after he started the trial, he stabbed himself to death and left a suicide
note behind.
The University was cleared of any wrong doing and malpractice claims but a lot of people
still believe that the university ignored the signs that he was suicidal and the patient
was not competent to consent to participating in the study.
The clinical trial that drastically affected pregnant women comes into number 3.
A drug called Thalidomide was manufactured in Germany for the purpose of treating respiratory
infections.
However, this drug is infamously known around the world because of its horrible effects
on pregnancy.
There were over 10,000 children born during the 60s that suffered from serious birth defects
such as missing limbs and cleft palates because of this drug.
Number 2 takes us to a Pfizer clinical trial.
Children in Nigeria were given a drug called Trovan during the 1990s meningitis outbreak.
However, 11 children were killed by this drug and it was later revealed that Pfizer did
not disclose to the parents that the drug was experimental and they even assured them
that it was tried and tested on humans before.
A tragic experiment makes it into our number 1 spot.
Back in 1996, a young college student agreed to participate in clinical trial because she
needed extra spending money.
The researchers inserted a tube down her throat and into her lungs in order to see how pollution
has affected her respiratory system.
But these researchers took more cell samples than they were supposed to and they increased
her dosage of anesthetic to a dangerous level so two days later she was found dead because
the anesthetic caused her heart to stop beating and the rest of her body began to fail as
well.
Well there you guys have it…