2025-03-24
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go to theguardian.com longread the Coventry experiment why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?
By Samira Shackle Read by danita Gohul in 2019,
Shahnaz Akhtar, a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick University,
was chatting to her sister who mentioned a documentary that had aired on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s.
It was about human radiation experiments,
including one that had taken place in 1969 in Coventry as part of an experiment on iron absorption,
21 Indian women had been fed chapatis,
baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent.
Having grown up in Coventry's tight knit South Asian community,
Akhtar was shocked that she had never heard of the experiment.
When she looked into it, she found an inquiry by the Coventry health authority in 1995.
Conducted soon after the documentary aired.
The inquiry examined whether the experiment put the subject's health at risk and whether informed consent was obtained.
But the only mention of the women's perspectives was a single sentence at the public meeting.
It was stated
that two of the participants who had come forward had no recollection of giving informed consent.