Khadija Magardie
The leading United States television news network, ABC, has drafted advertisements for the South African press seeking patients who were part of Dr Werner Bezwoda’s discredited clinical trials into breast cancer treatment.
The advert calls on women who were part of Bezwoda’s breast cancer trials at Johannesburg hospital to come forward to tell their stories, according to ABC.
The channel’s popular current affairs programme 20/20 will be airing the first of its two-part programme this week. The first programme will focus on the ethical issues relating to Bezwoda’s research, and how it has dealt a severe blow to advocates of bone-marrow transplants for the treatment of advanced breast cancer.
The continued interest by the US media in one of South Africa’s biggest-ever medical scandals comes as the University of the Witwatersrand wraps up its disciplinary hearing into Bezwoda.
The disgraced academic and researcher was due to stand on Friday before a panel comprising the university’s ethics committee and industrial relations representatives.
The American Society for Clinical Oncology (Asco), whose investigations prompted Bezwoda to admit he fiddled his cancer trials, will have representatives present as observers. It is believed that the team from Asco may be called as witnesses. The provincial health authority also has two observers at the hearing.
The probe is two-fold because Bezwoda was employed as a researcher by the university and as a professional oncologist at Johannesburg hospital, but the hearing is primarily concerned with Bezwoda’s alleged violation of the university’s disciplinary code.
The provincial Department of Health has compiled its own “charge sheet” against Bezwoda, which it has referred to the Health Professions Council, a regulatory body that has the power to censure medical professionals found guilty of misconduct.
According to the Gauteng chief director of hospital services, Dr Laetitia Rispel, there are broader issues relating to ethics and prospective preventative measures which necessitate the intervention of the Health Professions Council.
The council has the power to institute various disciplinary procedures, ranging from a warning, to fines, to striking professionals off the medical register. This effectively bars them from practicing elsewhere for either a limited amount of time, or indefinitely.
Rispel says that Bezwoda’s actions had “both ethical and resource implications”, because he used state resources to treat state patients.
The departmental “charge sheet” accuses Bezwoda of “unbecoming conduct”, in terms of the public-sector code for health professionals. It also accuses him of “fraud pertaining to the use of patient names and hospital file numbers”. Bezwoda was unable to furnish records of over half the women he claimed to have treated. Doctors believe Bezwoda either merely used the details of standard patients, who were not in fact part of any clinical trial, or made up patients.
Because Bezwoda’s trials were conducted as far back as 1991, Rispel says it has been difficult to track down any of the patients.
Hospitals are legally required to keep records for only up to seven years. Most of the women had advanced-stage breast cancer, and may be long dead.
Bezwoda, an internationally renowned oncologist, admitted formally last month to faking the results of clinical trials he conducted into the treatment of high- risk breast cancer.
At a conference in the US last year, Bezwoda presented his findings to an international gathering of experts, showing that breast cancer could be effectively treated by high doses of chemotherapy, followed by bone marrow transplants.
Because his results dramatically contradicted those of other researchers, a group of scientists were sent to study Bezwoda’s techniques.
They discovered that not only had Bezwoda misrepresented the names of the drugs used in his trials, but that he had sidestepped the university’s ethics committee in getting approval for his research.
He also failed to get signed consent from the indigent black women who participated in his study.