Yes, I know the U.S. government didn’t infect those African American men with syphilis. At least I hope it didn’t. But the freaking experiment went on for something like 40 years and involved hundreds of men.
But seriously, why wouldn’t you think that history would make people a little suspicious of people in power?
Two paths of Bayer drug in 80’s: Riskier type went overseas
A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs – medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS – to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980’s while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye, the documents indicate. In May of 1985, believing that the companies had broken a voluntary agreement to withdraw the old medicine from the market, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., summoned officials of the companies to a meeting and ordered them to comply. “It was unacceptable for them to ship that material overseas,” he said later in legal papers.
Even so, Dr. Meyer asked that the issue be “quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public,” according to Cutter’s account of the 1985 meeting.
AIDS drug test on foster children violated rules
The Associated Press reported May 4 that researchers in New York, Illinois and several other states funded by the National Institutes of Health had tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children since the 1980s, often without providing the children with independent advocates to protect their rights and interests.
There are all sorts of other incidents that feed into my suspicions the people in power aren’t necessarily concerned about the well-being of brown people. Things like the unethical marketing of Nestle baby formula in developing countries. The neurosurgeon who operated on young black boys, supposedly to “cure” their difficult behaviors. The list goes on and on:
The infringement of black Americans’ rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, black inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and ’70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children’s supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine — half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen — by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.
My personal experience? Some years back I got into a conversation with a city school teacher on a very long bus ride. For some reason we started talking about some of the research I was doing on Depo-Provera. I told her about how the drug was initially used overseas, the eleven years of drug testing on mostly poor, mostly black women in Atlanta who had not given informed consent, and about how the company stopped marketing the drug to dogs because it was bad for them. She asked me for some more descriptive information and then told me that children at her school (14 and under) were being given Depo-Provera shots at a clinic. I was stunned–the drug had not yet been approved for use as a contraceptive.
So it ain’t just Tuskegee.
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May 8, 2008 at 1:18 pm
panracial
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present: Harriet A. Washington
There is a looong history of using people in the Third World as guinea pigs and other medical abuses.
Also, (from: http://www.geocities.com/sassme.geo/sass-unicef.html) During the summer of 1995, the Catholic Women’s League of the Philippines won a restraining order against a two year old WHO and UNICEF anti-tetanus program. Two labs had found “B-hCG” sterilizing agent in the vaccine. The Filipino program had already “vaccinated” 3.4 million people (all women, mainly between the ages of 12-45). The hormone-laced vaccine was also discovered in Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, India and possibly Nigeria. The anti-hCG hormone causes not only surreptitious sterilizations, but also incurable auto-immune disorders, miscarriages and birth defects.
May 8, 2008 at 1:58 pm
macon d
Exactly. The “black community” is a useful tool in so many ways to those in power. So is the “illegal alien” community–funny how that issue gets so much attention whenever election time rolls around.
May 8, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Margaret
I was going to mention the book that panracial brought up….a must read.
I can speak for my own field which is dentistry. There is evidence that researchers have gone to poorer countries where they can get away with doing unethical research on the people there, children included.
Some people may say….well intentionally inflicting a cavity….oh that’s no big deal! Let me say that if you intentionally inflict a cavity on someone who may not have access to a doctor, dentist or some antibiotics, it can be fatal. This is esp true in kids where cavities travel faster within the tooth and so do the subsequent dental infections that can eventually lead to asphyxiation, brain infection and death.