American Experiments

Unethical Health Experiments Done in U.S.

• Posted by Yara Tercero-Parker
• February 28, 2011

 

[Courier-Journal]-U.S. government doctors once thought it was acceptable to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates, including 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 occurred 40 to 80 years ago, but it is the backdrop for this week’s meeting in Washington of a presidential bioethics commission. It 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 U.S. — studies that often made healthy people sick.

An Associated Press review of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. Some searched for lifesaving treatments; others hurt people but provided no useful results.

They will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study in which U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

Attitudes about medical research were different when the studies were done. Infectious diseases killed more people, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many researchers felt it was OK to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society — prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks.

“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.