Nigerian families got the go-ahead this week from the U.S. Supreme Court to sue the drug company Pfizer for carrying out an illegal trial of a new antibiotic on their children that produced fatalities.
 
The families say Pfizer did not get the proper consent to test the drug Trovan on 200 sick children during a meningitis outbreak in 1996. Later testing linked the drug to liver failure. It is banned in the European Union.
 
Eleven children died from the testing and others were blinded, paralyzed or brain-damaged.
 
Pfizer, which denies all wrongdoing, maintains it obtained verbal consent from the children's families, a point denied by the children's relatives.
 
Pfizer attempted to block the Nigerians from suing them under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners to seek compensation in US courts over violations of international law. But this claim was rejected by the Judges.

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