US researchers and pharmaceutical companies conducting human experimentation in Africa
African slums = human vivi$ection victim$
Posted by People’s Blog for the Constitution
A new policy brief faults prominent institutions and drug companies like Pfizer, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and Population Council, for their involvement in unethical and illegal human experimentation in Africa.
The report is titled “Non-Consensual Research in Africa: The Outsourcing of Tuskegee” in reference to the illegal human experiment conducted in Tuskegee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service. In that experiment, some 600 impoverished African-American men were observed in a study on the progression of untreated syphilis. Some of the men were intentionally infected with the disease and all of them were denied the cure. Regrettably, the report notes, no one was held accountable for this crime against humanity.
The new report details human experiments led by US researchers and drug companies on Africans who are typically undereducated, poor, and lack full understanding of their rights. The human subjects often are led to believe that they are receiving medical treatment from governmental health services or health ministries.
These practices hearken back to the appalling experiments carried out by US researchers in Guatemala in the 1940s where hundreds of Guatemalans were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases without information or consent. President Obama formally apologized to Guatemala for these experiments last year.
Human experimentation in the United States is regulated by the Office of Research Integrity and various Ethical Research Institutional Boards. Many African countries lack these institutions. Even when they exist, they lack independence and are controlled by corrupt government officials.
In one experiment on HIV sponsored by Gilead Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and operated by Family Health International, Cameroonian subjects were given details about the experiment in English even though many spoke only French and were illiterate. Five women were allegedly infected with HIV in the experiment but were not given antiretroviral drugs.
In another experiment in Nigeria led by Pfizer physicians, researchers injected children with an antibiotic called Trovan during a meningitis outbreak without providing their families with informed consent forms that fully disclose the side effects and purpose of the experiment. Eleven children died and many were left paralyzed.
In South Africa and Namibia, mothers with HIV/AIDS are routinely sterilized without their informed consent. Countries that perform these procedures are known to receive funding in the form of grants and incentives from USAID and other aid organizations.
The report explains that US researchers and drug companies violate the laws and protocols of the Declaration at Helsinki (1964) and the Belmont Report which provide ethical guidelines on human experimentation.
Moreover, the results of unethical and fraudulent experiments are laundered in the United States and Europe through the peer-review system. Many of the “peers” who review these experiments are themselves involved in the same unethical conduct. Others are concerned about the possibility of professional alienation if they speak out.
The authors make several demands so that these practices are ended. They include holding congressional hearings so that the matter is brought to the public’s attention and enacting new legislation to ensure that drugs are not approved by the FDA unless the research on which they are based comply with ethical research principles.
To submit an article for publication, send a note to camille@negotiationisover.net.
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Categories: Animal Liberation
2 Comments »
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November 10th, 2011 at 10:44 pm
No surprises here then. We know vivisectors have no empathy and would have no scruples about using humans if it were legalised. There have been many instances where humans have been used in experiments.. somewhere on youtube is a video or two showing early footage of Pavlov’s gross experiments on dogs and children and I’m sure he is one of many who did so, albeit covertly. Anyone who can justify causing such fear and pain in another living being has no empathy and those incapable of feeling empathy we call psychopaths. We are such a screwed up society.
November 19th, 2011 at 6:05 am
Ah! Still spreading lies Camille?
Aww… Now you are whining that we test on humans.
1. The Nigerian Meningitis outbreak killed nearly 350 people and mutilated nearly 1500 more. Meningitis is one of those real diseases we talk about and 9 deaths is a small number compared to 350…
2. The sterilisation was a government mandated procedure in HIV positive mothers. You know on the basis of most HIV postive mothers have HIV positive babies. You can spend a lot of money that you don’t have trying to save kids from HIV in which case you end up in a scenario where the mother will die leaving the kids (along with the father who would probably be HIV positive too) as orphans, or the kids themselves would have HIV. Yes you can reduce the rate of occurence by throwing money at the problem but frankly Namibia doesn’t have that much money to begin with and I don’t see animal liberation activists campaignin for cheaper HIV medication. INFACT, last I checked it was those awful vivisectors and those horrid doctors who spend time trying to get these medications out there.
3. Cameroonians speak English and French and a version creole, as a whole they can understand both languages. Many africans are bilingual atleast.
Honestly. Can you atleast construct a decent lie?
Oh and Carol… Pavlov’s research lets us treat GERD and Stomach Ulcers which are one of the biggest causes of death in young men. It helped establish that the hunger response is both conditioned and visual. That a psychological and physiological drive is present and this mechanism is what controls our diet, our habits such as binge eating, comfort eating, stress eating and anorexia. It also made correlations in the physiology of gastric acid secretion the manipulation of which stops stomach ulcers.
So yeah… Really useless research… Oh and he tested salivary gland neoplasms in children where the gland is already externalised by the growth. At the time there was no way to remove the gland as surgical technique hadn’t caught up with anatomy but again after animal experimentation the ability to remove a saliva gland was perfected.
So yeah you guys just don’t realise how useful research is. Oh and Camille just plain lies as usual…