A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorized and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.
An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorized genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients who were unable to give informed consent or without first obtaining health ministry approval.
At one hospital, staff pierced children's eardrums to apply an experimental medication that was yet to be approved in any other country.
At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.
Israeli Health Minister Dan Naveh, said that he had been "shocked'' at what he described as a failure of his department and a certain number of Israel's hospitals.
Jacques Michel, the former director of Hadassah hospital who triggered the comptroller's inquiry with a public warning about the abuses in 2001, on Tuesday called for the prosecution of the doctors.
"These doctors should be punished very severely because they really are criminals," Michel said.
Michel is head of the committee that approves medical experimentation at Hadassah, which is not among the accused hospitals.
"They should be stripped of their licenses to practise and they should be prosecuted. If you don't show by example that the medical profession does not accept this kind of conduct the phenomenon will go on and on. It's not an isolated phenomenon. It spread through different institutions," he said.
The state comptroller, Eliezer Goldberg, found that patients were often not properly informed about the experiments they were agreeing to and, in some cases, not told at all.
Every Israeli hospital has a medical ethics committee to oversee adherence to the 1964 Helsinki code on experimentation. But the comptroller said that the committees routinely failed to apply their own regulations and that the health ministry was negligent in enforcing standards.
Goldberg described a series of incidents at Harzfeld geriatric hospital as "extremely grave," including the cases of a 101-year-old woman and another woman aged 91, both of whom supposedly consented to being given experimental drugs without their families being informed first.
Researchers applied thumbprints of seven other patients at Harzfeld to consent forms that they were too senile to read or sign.
"At this age, 25 percent to 30 percent of these people are not fit to give informed consent because they suffer from dementia or senility,'' Michel said.
In other cases, doctors were unable to produce the consent forms that they said patients had signed.
The law requires researchers to keep consent forms for 15 years.
RSS