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Monday, February 28, 2011

Horrific US Medical Experiments Come to Light

Is this just the tip of the Iceberg?

Feb 27, 2011 – 1:04 PM
Mike Stobbe
AP
ATLANTA -- Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine 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.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States - studies that often involved making healthy people sick.
In this June 25, 1945 file photo, a doctor exposes a patient to malaria-carrying mosquitoes at Stateville Penitentiary in Crest Hill, Ill.
AP
In this June 25, 1945 photo, a doctor exposes a patient to malaria-carrying mosquitoes at Stateville Penitentiary in Crest Hill, Ill. A series of malaria studies at Stateville and two other prisons were designed to test antimalarial drugs that could have helped soldiers fighting in the Pacific during World War II.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect - they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease - even by the standards of their time - you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society - people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense - that we don't have today - that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

-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.

-A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.

-For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.

-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.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger - today remembered as a public health hero - recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth - an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done ... by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities - not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need - the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital's board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient's written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies - along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 - proved to be a "holy trinity" that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward "Yusef" Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

"I said 'Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this ... off me!'" Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. "It's not that we're out infecting anybody with things," Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT's use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it's often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.
The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

"It was unusually unethical, even at the time," said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

"When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today," said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM's sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. "They face a really tough challenge," Caplan said.

AP news researchers Susan James and Julie Reed Bell contributed to this report.
Search Amazon.com for medical experiments

See Forum Discussion in Above Top Secret:
Horrific US Medical Experiments Come to Light
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread668227/pg1





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Major Quake Swarm, Krisuvik Volcano, Iceland



krisuvik-volcano-earthquake-swarm-iceland
Credit: base image – Icelandic Met Office, overlay – MSB
Modern Survival for local Icelanders may be presented some challenges in the days ahead IF the trembling Krisuvik volcano decides to erupt.
A sudden and major earthquake swarm has struck on the Reykjanes peninsula at the southwest of Iceland and has unleashed more than 400 earthquakes as of this time. (Update, now over 800 at the end of the day)
The earthquake frequencies (Hz) have varied, as well as the depths and magnitudes, and their underlying cause is believed to be both magmatic and tectonic. During the past year the GPS monitoring station at the Krisuvik volcano has slowly been bulging higher, approximately 15 to 20 mm.
Krisuvik hasn’t erupted since 1340 and is believed to be of the variety of volcano that would erupt similar to that of Hawaii (Lava flow). This type of eruption would not hinder air traffic (good news for Europe).
However there is some concern, because if enough water is added to the eruptive mix, it would make the eruption and ‘explosive’ type of eruption. There is water nearby, and a 4 x 2 km lake situated a few km from the volcano itself.
No ‘official’ warnings have been given, and it is possible that this major activity will subside. At the same time though, the activity could go on and lead to an eruption. It is an amazing thing to watch these forces at work.
More than 200,000 people live within 25 km of the Krisuvik volcano.




Update, Krisuvik earthquake swarm sequence (27-Feb)
krisuvik-volcano-earthquake-swarm-sequence-27-feb-2011




Found the following Krisuvik region earthquake map at the Icelandic Met Office. An image showing previous earthquakes (black) and the new earthquakes from today’s swarm (red). It looks like today’s swarm depth is closer to the surface than most of the previous earthquakes.
Svartir hringir tákna skjálfta fram til 26. febrúar en rauðir þann 27. febrúar.
Black rings represent the tremor to 26 red on February 27th February.




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Volcano: Iceland's Inferno and Earth's Most Active Volcanoes

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The Integrity of America



A Pocket Peridot, The Integrity of America



Alright, dear readers, your very, very long wait for a new blog is to be rewarded. I'm sorry it's taken me this long to get something up! This is an essay that I wrote back in the Autumn of last year for a national essay contest put on by The Bill of Rights Institute. Unfortunately, I didn't win the competition, but it was very fun and incredibly educational. The question I had to answer was "What civic value do you believe is most essential to being an American?" After thinking about it a great deal, I decided that undoubtedly the most important civic value to the institution of our country is Integrity. So below is the essay that I composed and submitted to the contest. I hope you enjoy it! Tell me what you think!

Gretchen


The Integrity of America
by Gretchen Wolaver


Integrity is the pivotal value of America. Without it the structure of our society 
crumbles. The Founding Fathers desired to design a system replete with liberty, 
empowering citizens to pursue happiness without the intrusion of an oppressive 
government. They knew that this idea could only be realized if the morality of each 
individual was self-imposed, negating the need for excessive government regulations 
to maintain justice. A person with strong morals, they believed, would find the will 
from within themselves to do what was right.

The Bill of Rights is a potent example of this expectation. Consider the 1st
Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or 

prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the 
press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the 
government for a redress of grievances.” Yet the Founding Fathers knew that without 
the exercise of personal integrity these freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly 
and petition would be abused.


Modern times have shown them to be right. I have been dismayed at how my
generation exhibits an increasing lack of integrity, especially in light of technological 

empowerment. The internet has given my peers the power to broadcast lies about 
others, often ruining their lives. Now our courts are attempting to decipher how to 
bring justice to this new world of defamation. But how can they regulate something 
as gigantic as the worldwide web without marring the First Amendment? This 
modern crisis has underscored the importance of personal integrity to me, and has 
deepened my resolve to speak out against such slanderous bullying.


Today’s political scene is riddled with slander and deceit as well. I cringe as
the mud flies. The restoration of integrity must begin at the top, with the leaders of 

our government, who would do well to look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration.







Consider John Adams, for example, an honest and principled man who played 

a momentous role in the founding of our nation. Esteemed for his undaunted pursuit 
of integrity, his strength of character and conviction was fully displayed when he 
took on the job of defending the British soldiers in the court hearings after the Boston 
Massacre. The British sentries had shot and killed five civilians in self defense, but 
no lawyer would take their case—none except Adams.

At the time, he was a leading Patriot about to run for public office. Even
though he needed the Patriot vote, he knew that defending the soldiers was the right 

thing to do. Adams chose to side with justice and truth over the frenzy of popular 
opinion. He not only took on their case, he saved their lives. On the third anniversary 
of the Massacre, Adams wrote in his diary that defending the soldiers was “...one of 
the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and 
one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” It’s in this same 
disinterestedness for his own image that we see Adams’ sense of duty to his nation 
over self. He exhibited a self-driven morality that helped to secure a just government 
for his posterity, regardless of personal cost or gain.


Some might say that our country’s crucial value is not integrity, but freedom,
or justice. They may say that the Founders built our society upon these values to 

secure a country where the tyranny and injustice from which they had suffered would 
never happen again. This is a reasonable observation, but I would argue that integrity 
must come first. Freedom and justice are rooted in love and respect for mankind. 
When a nation’s robes of leadership are worn by hateful and irreverent people, 
freedom and justice will increasingly be overcome by litigation, bureaucracy, and 
regulation.


When asked what kind of government he and the other Founders had
established, Benjamin Franklin replied, “You have a republic, if you can keep it.” To 

sustain this Democratic Republic, we must preserve the same moral standards and 
convictions, the same integrity that the Founding Fathers expected of themselves and 
of us. It is a constant battle, but one that’s worth fighting. Integrity is vital to the 
pursuit of the American dream, to the realization of a nation founded upon truth, 
justice, and freedom. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a 
moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”


3 comments:


musicalmeadows said...
Very nice, Gretchen! Very good insight. I really enjoyed the part about Adams - I had never really considered what he was risking in defending the British. Thanks for sharing with us!!! Emily
kathryn Hall said...
Beautifully written, beautifully expressed...oh that people would heed this beautiful Truth in this unprecedented time. Welcome back, my dear! Love, Mrs. Hall :)
Jessica Hall said...
That's wonderful Gretchen!!! It is completely true! Thanks for posting! =P =D Jessica
Greensleeves

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life





A Pocket Peridot: The Integrity of America

http://gretchenwolaver.blogspot.com/2011/02/integrity-of-america.html

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