News

By Hilary White

JERUSALEM, October 12, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Four Israeli doctors have been charged with multiple counts of wrongful death through negligence and with doing medical experiments on the elderly patients in their charge between 2000 and2003.

A government report has blasted the ethics committee of the hospitals in question for approving genetic experiments and research studies involving uncertifed drugs.

The report and the police charges allege that the experiments were carried out without patient consent or the consent of their families.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the charges allege patients at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot and the Hartzfeld Geriatric Hospital in Gedera were victims of abuse involving hundreds of exeperiments that directly caused the death of one patient. 12 more died either during or shortly after one of the experiments.

The four suspects were also charged with fraud, forgery, and obstruction of an investigation.

Of the four arrested, newspapers named Shmuel Levy, deputy director of Kaplan-Hartzfeld with responsibility for Hartzfeld; Nadya Kagansky, and Alona Smirnov. A fourth has not been named.

A Health Ministry inquiry showed that four doctors and the hospital at which they worked gained their reputation as experts in geriatric medicine based on the illegal experiments.

The report said that some consent forms had allegedly been signed by a 101-year-old woman and a 91-year-old woman who suffered from dementia without a relative or a legal guardian having signed the form.

The records showed that seven patients – some of them older than 90 – “signed” consent forms with only their fingerprint.