Nigeria's Drug trial settlement

According to this report in IOL, Pfizer Inc and Nigeria are keen to reach an out-of-court settlement over a 1996 drug trial that Nigeria says caused the death of 11 children and left dozens disabled, a lawyer for the drugmaker said on Friday. Nigeria's federal government and its northern state of Kano sued Pfizer more than a year ago for a total $8,5-billion (about R680-billion) in damages over the testing of the antibiotic Trovan in Kano during a 1996 meningitis epidemic that killed 12 000 children. The civil and criminal cases launched by Nigeria's authorities have grown into a tangle of unresolved petitions and counter-claims, dragging from one adjournment to the next. Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, denies all charges stating that it was meningitis that killed the children or damaged their health, while Trovan saved lives and was as effective as the other, established drug used for comparison in the trial.