A fresh outcry has risen in the US and Nepal over what could be the American government’s exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find

A fresh outcry has risen in the US and Nepal over what could be the American government’s exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find a Hepatitis vaccine.

Since the 1980s, the US Army had been studying Hepatitis E, said to account for 50 percent of hepatitis cases in developing countries, in order to come up with a vaccine for the protection of its troops abroad.

In 1995, the US Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS), the Thai-based branch of Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, set up a unit in Kathmandu to conduct clinical trials.

Robert McNair-Scott of AFRIMS was the principal US investigator and Mrigendra Shrestha his counterpart in Nepal. Lt Col Robert Kuschner was the trial’s project director from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

The vaccine, patented by Californian company Genelabs and licensed by GlaxoSmithKline, is to hit the market in 2007.
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Last week, Glaxo released information at a scientific meeting, saying the vaccine was successful, but kept silent about making it available in Nepal.

Now epidemiologists at Yale’s School of Medicine and other activists have raised the issue afresh, expressing the fear that the trial might have been unethical.

“The poorest of the poor were used as subjects,” a Yale project staff said on condition of anonymity.