"in India Doctors do bury their mistakes."

The good ones come to the UK.

Some of our best medical brains trained in India, and a generalisation such as your is a slur on Indian medicine.

This is so sad...

Strawballs

"..but I don't know that Newsnight has done anything helpful! How dare they raise the subject of the plebs being used!!"

I'm not sure what all that means. if you're trying to say that Newsnight was right to publicise what's happening I agree, but with subjects like this it's good to have some perspective - testing along these lines isn't a new thing, it's been going on for at least five years, both in India and elsewhere.

Between 2007 and 2010 an estimated 1730 people died whilst or after participating in drug trials. All of these people were ill before they started the trial, so it's difficult to know whether the trial was responsible or whether they died as a result of their illness - this is always an issue with trialling new drugs.

Some years ago I worked extensively with an organisation that monitored trialling of drugs in both Europe and Asia, and I saw how many people in Asia were involved - it was a substantial number.

India is by no means at the top of the list when it comes to deaths related to clinical drugs trialling - Russia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, all have more.

The culprit, if you want to single out a single one is the way that the rules on trialling were relaxed in 2005. Big populations (particularly India) are popular with drug companies because they have genetic diversity, and a wealth of people with all kinds of different illnesses.