This video from Ireland says about itself:
Action Lariam for Irish Soldiers
20 November 2014
Please share this important podcast as we hear from ex-Irish Defence Force members highlight the grave circumstances around the use of Lariam. Lariam is an extremely dangerous drug with damaging and long lasting side effects. This show must be heard and spread across Ireland.
Members of the Irish Defence Forces are not legally or constitutionally protected in this matter. They need the people to raise a voice and stand for them and with them in putting an end to this and protecting our fellow country men and women.
Join Action Lariam for Irish Soldiers here.
From daily News Line in Britain:
Thursday, 1 September 2016
Dannatt would not use Lariam, but permitted it to be used on thousands of troops!
FORMER Army chief of staff Lord Dannatt has apologised on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme for allowing British troops to take an anti-malaria drug despite knowing it can have ‘catastrophic’ mental health effects, and deciding not to use it himself.
The MoD’s doctors prescribed Lariam to more than 17,000 troops between April 2007 and March 2015.
Dannatt told the BBC that his own son had taken the drug and had become ‘extremely depressed’ suffering mental health problems after taking two doses of Lariam. He was not in the armed forces at the time, but had been prescribed the drug by his father’s Army doctor.
Dannatt, who was head of the Army from 2006 to 2009, said the drug’s side-effects – which can include depression and suicidal thoughts – could be ‘pretty catastrophic’. Dannatt said that the MoD was now afraid of opening ‘the floodgates’ to ‘very expensive’ claims.
An ex-soldier Andy told the programme that he was issued with Lariam on the Army’s tour of Sierra Leone in 2000. ‘The effects were almost immediate … I can be a nasty, violent person and I attribute it to this drug. Anything could be misconstrued – a look, a phrase, a word, something completely innocent in someone else’s eyes – but it would be enough to trigger a reaction. A reaction you knew you were doing but you couldn’t stop it.
‘It was as if the wiring in your brain had completely gone. Had I known what the side effects were, I would have taken my chances with malaria. It turned me into an ogre.’
Perhaps this was the quality that the MoD wanted the troops to display to the local population!
In fact, British troops were being treated with contempt as highly expendable cannon fodder. Another fact is that the British ruling class has always treated its soldiery in the same brutal callous fashion and not just in the 19the and early 20th centuries. The development of nuclear weapons saw them tested out not just on Japanese civilians but on British troops and sailors.
Servicemen were stationed to observe the British H Bomb explosions on Christmas Island in the late 1950s, while naval launches were ordered to sail through the blast area. Troops exposed to the blast said that they had no protective gear, but were ordered to turn their backs and cover their faces with their hands. Some reported the flash was so bright they could see their bones through closed eyes, like an X-ray. Others were knocked down by the blast and burned by the heat.
Combat engineer Ken McGinley (founder of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association) has said that afterwards he was ordered to clean up piles of dead birds and bomb debris. Men went swimming in the lagoon, ate fish they caught in the blast zone, and drank rainwater collected in tarpaulins – oblivious to any risk from radioactive fallout. It was the perfect test on unsuspecting soldiers!
Some servicemen got sick while still on Christmas Island; others became ill after returning home. Some seemed fine for decades before developing cancers and other rare diseases. Nuclear test veterans reported that their wives had high rates of miscarriages and stillbirths, and their children also suffered from birth defects and unusual diseases.
Then in Iraq in 2003, the UK used depleted uranium weapons. ‘UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,’ UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox said in a written reply to the House of Commons.
A joint inquiry by Iraq’s environment, health and science ministries uncovered more than 40 sites across the war-torn country contaminated with high levels of radiation. ‘The study that we have conducted does actually prove that there are massive increases in cancer, a 38-fold increase in leukemia, 10-fold increase in breast cancer and infant mortalities are also staggering,’ one of the authors of the report, British-Iraqi scientist Malak Hamdan, said.
The issue is clear. The British army is made up of expendable cannon fodder, as far as the ruling class is concerned.
“Dannatt would not use Lariam, but permitted it to be used on thousands of troops!”
This opening statement is misleading and changes the slant of the story. Larium was prescribed to Lord Dannant’s son (who was not in the forces)in 2008 by an army surgeon at Dannant’s request. It was after Dannatt saw the mental side effects on his son that he started calling for it to be banned. Prior to that, he had no knowledge of these side effects in a minorty of those who took it.
It’s not true that he refused to take the drug, but was happy for the troops to do so. It was his son’s condition that first alerted him to the effects of the drug
In 2009 he retired from his post. In 2013 Dannat gave press interveiws damanding that the drug be withdrawn from use, but the MOD is STILL defending it’s use. Dannatt is still trying to bring attention to this situation. He shouldn’t be painted as the bad guy when he is not.
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Indeed, the biggest villains seem to be the MoD. Couldn’t Dannatt have ordered to stop Lariam before his retirement in 2009? And did he did not hear any complaints about it from soldiers before 2008?
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I don’t know, I wasn’t involved and can only read different sources of information. Although he was Commander of the Army – he worked for the Ministry of Defense. I doubt anyone really quite realised what was going on with this drug in the early days.
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However, the article says:
“An ex-soldier Andy told the programme that he was issued with Lariam on the Army’s tour of Sierra Leone in 2000. ‘The effects were almost immediate.”
See also:
https://www.rt.com/uk/357741-lariam-malaria-dannatt-sorry/
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/24/mod-disregarded-malaria-drug-precautions-say-mps/
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“Lord Dannatt also suggested the MoD was afraid of opening the “floodgates” to “very expensive” compensation claims if it admitted the drug had harmed troops.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/31/former-head-of-army-says-i-would-not-take-lariam-as-he-apologise/
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‘The effects were almost immediate.” Yes, that may be the case but the MOD buys a comodity, it does so in huge amounts, after a procurement process, a cdouple soldiers reporting side effects of an army issue drug is not going to have much effect. All I was arguing was that is shouldn’t be personalised against one man who wasn’t entirely responsible or even able to to do much about the situation.
Also, while I’m on the line, this situation is not the same as the H Bomb test on soldiers. Which was a vile experiment. This was a drug that people genuinely thought would protect them. It was not an experiment.
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I agree there is a difference between the H bomb experiment and Lariam. However, my link above here points out that MPs say that the MoD at some point got to know about the side effects, but still continued. Lord Dannatt said the focus on the Afghan and Iraq wars meant low priority for the Lariam problems.
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Here is a page on Lariam side effects:
https://www.drugs.com/sfx/lariam-side-effects.html
At the bottom, a list of articles of these side effects.
One of them:
Bjorkman A “Acute psychosis following mefloquine prophylaxis.” Lancet 2 (1989): 865.
So, the MoD might have known already in 1989.
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Absolutely, also at that time Dannatt and others were fighting with MOD to properly equip combat troops in a new theatre of war.
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