Nigeria: Pfizer pays Nigeria drug-trial victims

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has begun long-awaited compensation payments to families over a 1996 drug trial blamed for the deaths of 11 children and disabilities in dozens of others. But the payments were initially distributed only to four families, while some 200 children participated in the trial of meningitis drug, Trovan. Parents of four of the children who died as a result of the trial received cheques of $175,000 each at a reception in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, where the trial took place.