Radioactive chapati thread leads to calls for inquiry

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, external, 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.

Two inquiries in the 1990s were unable to trace all of the women involved.

"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," she said.

The MRC said ethics and regulation across the medical research sector had strengthened since its inquiry report, external was published 25 years ago.

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 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.

"It is possible that, despite the best intentions of the research team, full details of the study were not grasped by the women involved," it added.

Coventry Health authority stated in its 1995 inquiry report the levels of radioactivity were similar to chest x-rays at the time.

Dr Raw believes the inquiries presented "a partial picture at best" and is happy her social media posts have led Coventry North West MP Taiwo Owatemi to call for a fresh inquiry and parliamentary debate.

"We need to trace all the people who've been potentially experimented on without their will," said Dr Raw.

The MRC said in a statement it understood renewed concerns over how the study was conducted and what was learned from the inquiry, which had deemed it a "model" for its period.

"We are contacting Taiwo Owatemi MP to help ensure those questions can be answered," a spokesperson said.

University of Warwick researcher Shahnaz Akhter has been looking into what happened since 2019 as part of research on the experiences of South Asian women in the UK.

She told BBC CWR it was important to remember medical ethics had moved on considerably since the study was carried out, but also to place the study participants at the centre of any future inquiries.

"At the heart of it is 21 women who may or may not have realised that they were the subject of a research project which, at the time, used radio isotopes," she said.

"Any kind of research needs to be done in consideration with what those women want because, at the end of the day, it's their lives that have been impacted.

"I think the right thing to do at the moment is to let the parliamentary [statutory] inquiry that Taiwo is calling for to play out so that we can have that public hearing, so that people know what was going on so that they can understand the circumstances in which the research took place, what's happened since, and for there to be full transparency."

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