Ugly US medical experiments uncovered (AP)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022700988.html

Ugly US medical experiments uncovered
By MIKE STOBBE

... A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine. Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

- In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes. A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

- Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn't explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task...

- Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper. The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected - by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives. Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced...

When I was a kid, he was regarded as a saint.

was unfortunately a fairly common technique until relatively recently.

They still use male students (now paid pretty well) for gonorrhea experiments at UNC Chapel Hill.

informed consent were tightened up. Now most volunteers are prisoners and college students who are eager to earn a few bucks for science. Legally, they have to be informed of known risks and that there might be unknown risks. They have to be able to sign their names, even if they can't read medicalese gobbledygook.

It's still not perfect and some people really don't understand they are assuming significant risk, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was in the 40s and 50s.

Today the men of money and power have ethics. Right?