http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ortal.html
Patients in Israeli hospitals, among them the elderly, children and the mentally infirm, have been used as guinea pigs in medical experiments without permission from their legal guardians, according to the country's main government watchdog.
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Geriatric patients had their fingers inked to give fingerprints authorising the tests even though they suffered from senile dementia and would not have known what they were doing.
Some children had their eardrums deliberately pierced so that a drug, not approved for medical use anywhere else in the world, could be applied. Such tests needed approval but the hospital did not apply to the ministry.
In another case, a painful procedure using a needle to draw urine from the bladder for testing was performed without the necessary ministry approval.
Unlicensed drugs and invasive procedures were also used on patients, sometimes by researchers who were not even doctors. In one clear conflict of interest the researcher was employed by the commercial company selling the procedure.
And even though any fatality during such clinical tests should be reported to the ministry within 48 hours, it took researchers more than a week to pass on the information in 21 out of 37 deaths. Some took more than a month.
The image of helpless victims being experimented on is especially sensitive in Israel because of the horrors inflicted on Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz by its Nazi camp doctor, Josef Mengele.
The tests carried out in Israeli hospitals, however, bear no comparison with the sadism of the man known as "the Angel of Death".
The disturbing revelations shocked Dan Naveh, the country's health minister, although he has been criticised for a lack of urgency on the issue of medical testing. After eight years' work, a bill to control experimentation is still not finished.
The findings filled more than half of the 106-page annual report on Israel's health ministry drawn up by Eliezer Goldberg, the state comptroller.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the comptroller found the ministry guilty of negligence and carelessness in supervising the hospitals where tests were carried out.
The paper reported that the violations were worst in geriatric, rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals.
At the Harzfeld Rehabilitation Hospital, a 101-year-old woman and a 91-year-old woman included in a medical trial signed consent forms without a relative or a legal guardian giving written approval.
In other tests at the same hospital, seven patients "signed'' consent forms with only their inked fingerprint.
Israel is committed to following the 1964 Helsinki Declaration on biomedical experimentation, a code of practice drawn up by the World Health Organisation.
Israel's government ombudsman found routine abuses of the Helsinki Declaration's principles at a number of hospitals across the country.
The report also said that in some cases hospitals provided insurance for the practitioners carrying out the tests but not the patients. Existing guidelines say trial patients must be given adequate insurance.