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Nigerian families can sue the Pfizer drugs giant in the US over its alleged role in the deaths of children, a US appeals court has ruled.
The decision overturns ruling by a lower court that the case must be heard in Nigeria.
Pfizer is accused of killing 11 children and injuring 181 others when an experimental antibiotic, Trovan, was tested on them during a meningitis epidemic in 1996.
The Nigerian government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group Trovan.
Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.
The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use."
Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.
BBC
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