noworldsystem.com

Pictures have emerged providing the shocking proof that U.S. government doctors once experimented on disabled American citizens and prison inmates.

Such experiments included 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 horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission.

The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last year 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 America – studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

A review by the Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies.

At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments – at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

It echoes the deadly and meritless experiments conducted on Jewish concentration camp detainees at the hands of Nazi doctors.

And it will undoubtedly be compared to the Tuskegee syphilis study, where U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis – but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, said: ‘When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession.’

Most of the recently revealed studies, from the 1940s to the 1960s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients or the poor blacks.

Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society – who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments – said: ‘There was definitely a sense – that we don’t have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important.’

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimised for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government’s Dr Joseph Goldberger – today remembered as a public health hero – recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency (The men were offered pardons for their participation).