America wickedness part 1

DOES OUR GOVERNMENT RESPECT HUMAN LIFE?

1845: (1845 - 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns' skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

1895: New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls "an idiot with chronic epilepsy" with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

1896: Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston's Children's Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful

1900: A U.S. doctor doing research in the Philippines infects a number of prisoners with the Plague. He continues his research by inducing Beriberi in another 29 prisoners. four test subjects die (Merritte, et al.; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

 

1911: Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children's parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis ("Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War").

The Pellagra Incident

 Pellagra is an ailment commonly caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B-13) in the human diet. The symptoms include skin lesions, sunlight sensitivity, dementia and ends in death. At the turn of the twentieth century, millions of people in the United States died from this disease. Scientists claimed that the cause of the disease was a toxin found in corn. In 1915, the U.S. Surgeon General ordered government funded experiments on Black prisoners afflicted with pellagra. Poor diet and niacin deficiency was found to be the cause. However, these life-saving findings were not released to the public until 1935 because the majority of Pellagra-induced deaths affected Black communities.

 

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

 

The Public Health Service started working with the Tuskegee Institute in 1932. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. 399 of those men had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201 did not have the disease. The men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance, for participating in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood", a local term for various illnesses that include syphilis, anemia, and fatigue.

Unethical Study

There are 6 main points which are regarded as highly unethical in the study:

1.There was no informed consent.

2.The participants were not informed of all the known dangers.

3.The participants had to agree to an autopsy after their death, in order to have their funeral costs covered.

4.Scientists denied treatment to some patients, in order to observe the individual dangers and fatal progression of the disease.

5.Participants were not given the cure, even when it was widely known and easily available.

6.The designers used a misleading advertisement: The researchers advertised for participants with the slogan; "Last Chance for Special Free Treatment". The subjects were NOT given a treatment, instead being recruited for a very risky spinal tap-diagnostic.

A Heavy Price in the Name of Bad Science

By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science?

 

To persuade the community to support the experiment, one of the original doctors admitted it "was necessary to carry on this study under the guise of a demonstration and provide treatment." At first, the men were prescribed the syphilis remedies of the day - bismuth, neoarsphenamine, and mercury - but in such small amounts that only 3 percent showed any improvement.

These token doses of medicine were good public relations and did not interfere with the true aims of the study. Eventually, all syphilis treatment was replaced with "pink medicine" - aspirin.

To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the PHS doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: "Last Chance for Special Free Treatment." The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed.

As a doctor explained, "If the colored population becomes aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, every darky will leave Macon County..." Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study..

A Few Good Mengeles

One Nazi doctor cited in his defense the work of American Colonel Dr. Richard P. Strong - later Professor of Tropical Medicine at Harvard - who infected Philippine convicts with cholera and the bubonic plague, killing 18 people. Survivors were compensated with cigars and cigarettes.

A Dachau doc referred to the work of public health official Dr. Goldberger, who in 1915 produced the disease pellegra in Mississippi convicts. One test subject said that he had been through, "a thousand hells," and another swore he would choose a lifetime of hard labor rather than go through such an experiment again.

Also cited were a series of experiments conducted in 1944 in a Chicago prison where 441 convicts were infected with malaria. British Medical Journal commentary: "One of the nicest American scientists I know was heard to say: 'Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material - and much cheaper than chimpanzees.'"

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sisterthundershow/2014/04/11/america-wickedness-part-1