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A Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom has called for a statutory inquiry into medical research carried out on Indian-origin and South Asian women decades ago in the city of Coventry.
Taiwo Owatemi, the Labour MP for Coventry North West, said that there were concerns over the use of radioactive isotopes in chapatis that were fed to the women as part of a study purportedly on combating iron deficiency among South Asian women in the city.
“My foremost concern is for the women and the families of those who were experimented on in this study,” she said, claiming that the women’s consent was not sought and proper information on the experiment was not given to them.
Owatemi added that no follow-up studies were done to see its impact on the women’s health. She said she will raise the matter in Parliament when it convenes in September.
As part of a study, in 1969, around 21 Indian-origin women, identified by a general practitioner (GP) in Coventry, were given Chapatis containing Iron-59, a radioactive iron isotope.
According to a BBC report, the women had sought medical help from the GP for minor ailments but were then, without their knowledge, made part of a research trial to address the issue of widespread anaemia (a disease caused by iron deficiency) in the city’s South Asian population. Researchers suspected traditional South Asian diets were to blame.
Chapatis containing Iron-59 were delivered to participants’ homes. After eating the chapatis, women in the study were taken to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Oxfordshire, where their radiation levels were measured to judge how much iron had been absorbed, The Guardian reported.
The UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC) said the study proved that “Asian women should take extra iron because the iron in the flour was insoluble”.
A 1995 documentary titled ‘Deadly Experiments’, brought significant attention to studies that administered radioactive substances in the 1950s and 1960s in the UK and the US.
A Punjabi-origin woman named Pritam Kaur, one of the 21 patients in the Coventry experiment, and her son appeared in the film. Kaur said she visited her local GP with a complaint of experiencing migraines. He then suggested that some chapatis would be sent to her house for a few days. She said she was not told what they contained or that she was part of a larger experiment. “If we knew, we wouldn’t have eaten it,” she said.
A chapati would be sent in the morning and a person would call them in the afternoon to check if she ate it. One day, she and two women were driven to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment and put in a machine. Public criticism following the documentary led to the MRC establishing an independent Committee of Inquiry.
This committee’s report in 1998 said that low levels of radiation can be dealt with by the human body up to a certain threshold. However, it added, that many do not accept this view and say that the damage to human DNA due to any level of radiation is more severe.
In its conclusion, the report suggested that the nature of the studies shown in the documentary did not appear to be unethical. Still, there were “concerns over questions of consent, understanding in the light of giving consent, and the degree to which the risks were explained to the participants or even taken into account by researchers,” it noted.
Further, researchers also made some prior judgements about the benefits and costs of the study without keeping the participants at its centre, in line with the “paternalistic nature of science (and wider society at the time)”. Suggestions were given, saying if such studies were conducted today, the written material should be made available in the participants’ own languages.
It also noted that “By far, the most difficult question to answer some 26 years after the study is that of informed consent.” The MRC no longer had the list of the study’s participants. A public call for participants to come forward also did not yield results.
While the procedures for such experiments are much stricter today, back then the need to provide written explanations to participants or get their written consent was not necessary. It also said the documentary “caused considerable unnecessary concern” among Asian people and that their portrayal was “seriously misleading”.
An isotope of a chemical element has the same number of protons in its atom but a different number of neutrons. For instance, uranium-235, used in nuclear bombs and reactors, is an isotope of uranium which contains 92 protons and 143 neutrons. On the other hand, uranium-238, the most commonly occuring uranium isotope in nature, has 92 protons and 146 neutrons.
Simply put, radioactive isotopes are unstable forms of an element that emit radiation to transform into a more stable form. Such isotopes have unstable nuclei, i.e. the proton to neutron ratio is such that they contain excess energy in the nucleus. This excess energy is dissipated spontaneously through radiation – the emmission of energy through waves or particles.
Depending on the amount and the specific kind, radiation can have various long term health effects on human beings.
Owatemi said in her statement that a recommendation of the MRC report to identify the women was never followed up. This would have given them the chance to share their stories, receive any support needed, and learn lessons from the experiments, she said. An MRC spokesperson said an independent inquiry, commissioned following a documentary on Channel 4 in 1995, had examined questions raised.
Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, also said that she has discussed the issue with a University of Warwick academic who is researching the matter.
In a recent statement from MRC, it reiterated the findings and said it remained committed to the highest standards, including “commitment to engagement, openness and transparency”.
