Shameful past of medical trials prompts new US investigations

Shameful past of medical trials prompts new US investigations

The revelation that Americans infected Guatemalans with syphilis is a terrible reminder of experiments on blacks, prisoners and the mentally ill, and Obama is demanding action

Mike Stobbe

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Shocking as it may seem, US government doctors once thought it acceptable to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital. At one point, pharmaceutical company officials said they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Much of this horrific history is at least 40 years old, but it was the backdrop to a meeting in Washington last week of a presidential bioethics commission. The gathering was triggered by the government's apology last autumn for federal doctors having infected prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago. US officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in America, which often involved making healthy people sick.

A review by Associated Press of reports in medical journals and press clippings has found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were part of searches for life-saving treatments; at worst, they amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results. Inevitably, they will be compared with the well-known Tuskegee study. In that episode, US health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment, even after penicillin became available.

the rest:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/shameful-past-of-medical-trials-prompts-new-us-investigations-2233624.html