MSNBC Headline: "Government Tested AIDS Drugs On Foster Kids"!!!

[DistressedAmerican]

Can anyone say illegal medical experimentation? Remember Tuskeegee? You'd think we would learn!

Long Article. Worth the read.

====================================================================

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7736157/

Government tested AIDS drugs on foster kids
Children not provided with basic legal protection, review finds


Dr. Ram Yogev, director of the pediatric HIV/AIDS program at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, examines a former foster child who is now adopted, on April 8 in Chicago. The hospital participated in federally funded AIDS research that tested AIDS drugs on children, including foster children.

By John Solomon
The Associated Press

Updated: 5:30 p.m. ET May 4, 2005

WASHINGTON - Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.

The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren’t yet available in the marketplace.

The practice ensured that foster children — mostly poor or minority — received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.

[tjdee]

1. Ooh, just like King of Torts by John Grisham!

Isn't it wonderful when real life can follow in fiction's footsteps?
:sarcasm:

And what is to be done here, that's what I'd like to see.
Just what are they going to do for these people?

[Mr_Spock]

2. This is why they want to illegalize abortion - more research humans!

I think some people are fucking hypocrites.

[DistressedAmerican]

9. Culture Of Life Baby! Can't Believe American's Eat That Crap Up.

Shallow, Stupid Civilization!

[PowerToThePeople]

3. Amy Goodman owns MSNBC

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/02/1348210&mode=thread&tid=25

Monday, May 2nd, 2005

Hundreds of HIV+ Foster Children in NYC Subjected to Experimental Drug Trials

New York City's child welfare department opens an investigation into whether they forced HIV positive children in foster care to submit to experimental AIDS drug trials. We speak with the commissioner for New York's Administration for Children's Services, New York City councilman Bill Perkins and Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

[Roland99]

6. She was in town here tonight...couldn't make it

Why do these great speakers come to town when I have my daughters for the weeks?

[nytemare]

4. Did this break right before the election?

Seems like it did and got buried.

Great story.

[PowerToThePeople]

7. Ya I think it did

I searched on NPR and DemocracyNow! for it. I distinctly remember hearing an interview on it some time ago.

[nytemare]

10. I thought I remembered something about New York

And I think it was shortly before election, because I was talking about it to the fundy I worked with.

[NMDemDist2]

5. Democracy Now! broke that story three days ago n/t

[Sydnie]

8. Could explain why so many kids go missing in Florida

while in the states custody? Were they victims of experiments gone wrong? Wouldn't have to be this study actually. If they would do this kind of testing, just where would they stop?

[Catherine Vincent]

11. Our government is the reason thousands of our kids turn up missing

every year. Ask Noreen Gosch.

[DistressedAmerican]

12. Her Boy Has Been Found Though...

Should have stayed among the missing if you ask me.

[Catherine Vincent]

14. "her boy has been found..."

He and the others shouldn't have been snatched in the first place. A lot of them don't get found.

[sharonking21]

13. I would withhold judgment on this for a while

(Edited to take out duplicate word)

I was an HIV epidemiologist at a state health agency from 1991 to 2003. As such, I dealt with public health and confidentiality questions rather than with clinical trials such as these.

I was on the agency's Institutional Review Board for about 5 years. We were not overwhelmed and we took each proposal very seriously. Thus although I do not have direct experience judging the ethics of clinical trials, I do have some experience evaluating HIV research proposals and looking for ethical questions regarding research on human subjects.

There are special requirements, I know, for research on any vulnerable population: Children, prisoners, etc. However, I am not at all sure that all states or cities have any such requirement as to appointing individual advocates for foster children (although perhaps they should)--further, I would like to know what percentage of the children in the trials were foster children--it doesn't really say. It does intimate that non-foster children were also a part of these trials.

Also, standards change over time as to ethics--generally getting more and more restrictive and in favor of the research subject. That is true now, but it wouldn't be fair to go back in time and apply the standards of 2005 to the situation before the advent of life-saving medications for HIV, which came in 1996.

I was at the International Conference on AIDS in the summer of 1996 in Vancouver when these new drugs were announced as effective and it was a joyous time.

You should understand that prior to that time most HIV-infected people --no matter what their station in life or age--actively sought out the opportunity for being included in clinical trials. That was because back then, HIV infection was an absolute death sentence--the hope of being helped greatly outweighed the risks in most people's minds, since the alternative was death, and perhaps a quick death with no opportunity to hang around long enough for something to be discovered to hold the infection in check, as eventually happened.

Yes AZT did help some people, but not all of them; furthermore the HIV virus within a person had a tendency to become resistant to it. And back then, children had particularly high death rates when they were infected with HIV so the opportunity to get them on experimental drugs was greatly prized. Like the one man said, eliminating foster children from such trials would have been considered at the time to be rank discrimination that favored children from richer, more intact families.

So keep an open mind until more is known about this.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

15. Sad, really sad`

Looks like this started during the Reagan years.

[DistressedAmerican]

16. Morning Kick!