Recently a professor by the name of Susan Mokotoff Reverby , published her research regarding medical experimental practices that occurred in the United States. It was discovered in 1979 that from 1932 to 1972 (40 years) a study was being held in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. public health service to test untreated syphilis. The study consisted of 400 poor African-American men, who were promised free meals and medicine if they participated. The majority of the men didn't even know they had syphilis, they were only informed that they had 'bad blood' and would be treated accordingly. The point of the research was to watch the progression of syphilis on the body so instead of injecting medicine, the doctors injected a placebo drug to allow the disease to run its full course. In 1947 penicillin became the standard treatment for syphilis, but despite this knowledge the medical team refused to treat patients, allowing many to die and spread the disease to their wives and children.
As if this wasn't horrible enough last month, in October 2010, Susan Reverby published her findings in regards to the United States syphilis research carried out in Guatemala. This was known as the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment. From 1946 - 1948 the United States medical team was knowingly infecting Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients with syphilis. Some victims were infected directly by the medical staff, whereas others were infected by prostitutes carrying the disease that the team had hired to have sex with the inmates.
As appalling as all this is the worst part is that in 1947, while all this was going on, the United States government was busy constructing the Nuremberg Code, which spoke out against the unethical medical experiments that were being carried out by the Nazis. The U.S. medical teams were fully aware of this code, but didn't think it applied to them simply because they weren't Nazis. It was apparently of no concern that their experiments were just as horrifying and often resulted in the same outcome....death. It isn't as though these are the only two examples of unethical medical research being carried out by the U.S. either....women in Puerto Rico were given dangerously high amounts of estrogen to test the birth control pill without their knowledge, hospital patients were injected with plutonia to study the effects on the body and the list goes on.
While I have focused solely on the United States deplorable actions, I'm not meaning to imply that we as Canadians are off the hook. Our history is as polluted as theirs, including the times we displayed our disgust along with the rest of the world over the Nazi regime. Were you aware of the fact that in 1928 we enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act, which allowed the government to forcibly sterilize women who they did not determine fit to conceive. They determined a women's reproductive rights based on an IQ test which was delivered in English, meaning immigrants were unlikely to pass, which was to the benefit of the government because it meant we could keep up our homogeneous society (ie. white).
Researchers are quick to point out that such practices are a thing of the past and have led to strict guidelines ensuring informed consent from the subjects, yet efforts are currently being made to loosen restrictions on experimental medicine in prisons.
You may wonder why I chose to ramble on at 3am about our lesser known history, but I think it is important that we remain aware of our governments policies and practices in the medical field. There are too many horrifying examples to just naively believe it could never happen again.
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