Soldiers as Guinea Pigs: the Case of Mefloquine and Tafenoquine

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The anti-malarial drug trial scandal that has embroiled the Australian Defence Force for the last two years simply won’t go away, despite the government’s best efforts to whitewash the controversy with a flawed “military justice” inquiry.

There are growing calls for a public inquiry to investigate ethical breaches which occurred during a series of Army Malaria Institute (AMI) clinical trials conducted in Bougainville and Timor Leste from 1999 to 2002.

The drugs in question are mefloquine, a neurotoxicant able to cause a “lasting or permanent” brain injury in a sizeable minority of users, and the experimental drug tafenoquine. The latter was found to be “more neurotoxic than mefloquine” by scientists from the US military research institute which developed both drugs.

Tafenoquine was given to more than 1,500 ADF personnel during these trials, while mefloquine was used on 1,300 personnel. Mefloquine has probably been given to an additional 2,000 personnel since its introduction in the early 1990s.

Hundreds of Australian veterans have since been diagnosed with serious neurological and psychiatric disorders, often mistaken for post-traumatic stress disorder. Many maintain they were compelled to participate in the trials. The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) has belatedly launched a health outreach program, admitting that the first cases “could be the tip of the iceberg”.

Media attention has to date focused on the health concerns of those affected and the ethical question of whether the subjects provided fully informed consent.

Yet a deeper question is emerging, namely a fundamental conflict between the commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the public interests of the ADF. This could even result in criminal charges against ADF medical officials who conducted the trials and now hold senior military appointments.

How could the ADF leadership have allowed this to happen?

Mefloquine and tafenoquine are both products of the US Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) anti-malarial drug discovery program which commenced during the Vietnam War. The results of early military tests of mefloquine were given to the manufacturer Roche in one of the first public-private partnerships of its kind. These questionable results were then used to shortcut the approvals process by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulators.

By the late 1990s mefloquine was well known for its serious side effects and fell out of favour to the extent it is no longer manufactured by Roche in many countries. Linked to numerous war crimes, murders and suicides over the last 15 years, mefloquine is now banned or regarded as a drug of last resort.

Tafenoquine is already repeating this tragic history, with the direct involvement of WRAIR and the closely affiliated AMI.

The ADF’s deployments to Bougainville and Timor Leste provided an ideal opportunity for AMI and WRAIR to conduct large-scale drug trials on a captive pool of “volunteers”. Tafenoquine and mefloquine were tested on almost every battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. The results of several of these trials have not been published, presumably because they were unfavourable.

Of the reports that were published, none commented on the serious adverse effects that emerged from the trials. One report that was published found there was “no statistical difference” between tafenoquine and mefloquine in the rate of neurological and psychiatric side effects. Many of the subjects are to this day admitted to psychiatric hospitals or have subsequently suicided — yet the ADF has refused to conduct follow up health studies.

A co-author of the published study has been stonewalling the proposed outreach program for years. Recently, he falsely informed doctorsinvolved in the outreach program that there were “no recorded neuropsychiatric side effects” from tafenoquine; contrary to his original report which found one in eight of his subjects experienced such side effects.

The results of this trial were re-analysed in a 2014 paper co-authored by the current Director of AMI to find that tafenoquine is 100% effective in preventing malaria. The lead author of this paper is a former WRAIR employee who now owns a niche pharmaceutical company awarded a contract by the US Army to develop the drug for registration with both the FDA and the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration. Should the FDA approve, his company would be given a tradeable “priority review voucher” worth several hundred million dollars.

In the 1990s the Canadian government responded to a similar scandal involving an unlawful mefloquine drug trial on peacekeeping troops in Somalia by disbanding the regiment that was subjected to the experiment.

On the evidence already publicly available, a more appropriate response from the Australian government would be to disband AMI and prohibit the conduct of clinical drug trials on ADF personnel deployed on military operations. The ADF is clearly incapable of providing the corporate oversight needed to protect the interests of its troops against those of the pharmaceutical industry.

* * * * *

This article is reprinted
from The Spectator

You can read more about
Major McCarthy HERE and HERE

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22 COMMENTS

  3. I think it’s quite relevant really. You’ve got a slew of neurological and “psychiatric” conditions developing because of this anti-malarial drug. Many neurological problems are going to be mislabeled “psychiatric” anyway. When you add psychiatric drugs, there is a great deal of potential to increase the amount of injury done. The purpose for psychiatric drugs, to one degree or another, is behavior control. Here we’ve got another instance of the problems that develop due to our over emphasis on the chemical answer, and some of those problems are going to be absorbed by the mental health system. This is, in one sense or another, the way the Kingdom of “dysfunction” grows.

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  5. For anyone interested in the mental health impacts of mefloquine, I recommend reading the gorgeous memoir “The Answer to the Riddle is Me”. David Stuart MaClean is a Pen/American award-winning writer who provides a compelling account of the devastating impact of mefloquine on his mental health and on his core identity.

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  9. Thanks Fiachra. This is the mission statement of MIA: “Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.”

    There are very large numbers of veterans in the US and elsewhere who are undergoing psychiatric care as a result of their exposure to mefloquine. Very few of them have been able to be properly diagnosed, hence they are being (mis)treated for “mental health” disorders with yet more psychiatric drugs when in reality they have brain injuries.

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    • Stuart (+ Catnight),

      I do support you. I know what it’s like to suffer from drugged induced “dysregulation” (and extreme/suicidal anxiety). The denial and the lack of understanding must be very frustrating.

      I was referring to the BMA (Link above) concentrating on prescription drug damage and difficulties BUT without the inclusion of the Neuroleptics.

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    • Actually the comment by Stuart above seems more clear than the article itself as to its relevance to MIA. Also, at first this seemed like a reprint without any actual participation by the author.

      In fact this represents yet another class of psychiatric cannon fodder, i.e. victims of corporate/govt. medical “treatment” being labeled as “mental health” cases.

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      • Oldhead,

        I can imagine these soldiers don’t know what’s hit them. It took me long enough in Psychiatry to figure things out. But I had a clever friend who clued me up to the medication side effects. He even cautioned me to the fact that the Neuroleptics could trigger suicide – and this was in the early 1980s.

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  10. This is important for all of us regardless on where we land on the continuum of MIA.
    It is important because we badly need more peers and cohorts.
    Medicine in and of itself like many societal institutions is self destructing.
    Rates for stressed out docs and the resultant issues are rising and most importantly even folks with cancer are beginning to question Big Pharma.
    There is across the board dysfunction and corruption.
    We have been the canaries and the coal mine is in big trouble
    Please don’t dismiss Stuart’s piece.
    For whom the bell tolls! – John Donne.
    Colalitions make much sense now more than ever.
    Rising voices of all kinds!
    And yes it won’t be plumb level or square- Alan Dugan
    But it will have the great possibility to create change
    We all can play pick up sticks after the victory party

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  12. It’s bad enough that the drugs are toxic. I also find the way that the drugs were given to the soldiers to be very problematical and disturbing. It’s like they were guinea pigs without much choice about the matter. And then when they begin manifesting very disturbing health problems everything is swept under the proverbial rug and hushed up. Everyone is in cahoots with the drug companies these days.

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