According to his colleagues, Dr. Avenilo Aventura of the Philippine Heart Center for Asia (PHCA) has: (1) disregarded the human rights of indigent patients by using them as guinea pigs in his experiments; (20) flouted medical ethics by implanting pig heart valves in these patients without the consent of their attending physicians; (3) ignored the PHCA’s own regulations by conducting these experiments without the approval of the PHCA’s Division of Research or ethics committee; (4) broken the law by manufacturing and implanting pig-valves without clearance from the Ministry of Health’s Bureau of Food and Drugs; and (5) violated the ethics of scientific experimentation by refusing to open his findings to the scrutiny of qualified colleagues.

Our current economic situation notwithstanding, Dr. Aventura is spending over P6 million on an international symposium at which the results of these controversial experiments will be presented. The pig-valve will be offered as an embodiment of the PHCA’s service to the peoples of Asia.

Dr. Aventura’s promotion of the pig-valve blatantly disregards the fact that the implant of any part of a pig in a human body is a heinous offense against the tenets of Islam. The very suggestion of such an implant would be normally repugnant to hundreds of millions of Muslim Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Malaysians, Indonesians, and Filipinos.

The Human rights of patients, professional ethics, accepted hospital procedures, the legal and administrative requirements of the Ministry of Health, the canons of scientific experimentation, religious-cultural prohibitions . . . is nothing sacred to this man?

Ruben Muego