By Asia Samachar | Britain |
A historian is “delighted” her social media post about a study in which Asian women were fed radioactive chapatis has led to renewed calls for an inquiry.
Dr Louise Raw’s thread on X, formerly Twitter, questions whether 21 research subjects from Coventry involved in the 1969 study gave informed consent. The migration lecturer discovered the story in a 1995 documentary for Channel 4 called Deadly Experiments, with two inquiries in the 1990s unable to trace all of the women involved, reports BBC.
“I don’t think the Medical Research Council (MRC) ever took it seriously enough,” she said. “I just thought, this is absolutely shocking. I started teaching about it. I started mentioning it when I did public speaking and I just found people did not know about it.”
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The MRC said ethics and regulation across the medical research sector had strengthened since its inquiry report was published 25 years ago.
In 1969, Pritam Kaur of Coventry sought medical help for a migraine and unknowingly became part of an experiment. Along with 20 other Punjabi women suffering from various ailments, they were given chapatis containing radioactive iron salts as a supposed cure.
The hour-long documentary featured a woman who said she had not known chapatis given to her in a medical experiment contained a radioactive substance. Subsequent investigations by the Coventry Health authority and MRC investigated participants’ consent, the report added.
The 1998 MRC inquiry stated language barriers and the reliance on family members as interpreters hampered researchers’ communication with participants. It was “possible that a word did not exist for ‘radiation'” in the languages spoken by the women, the committee’s report said.
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