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Experiments on Children |
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The items below have been extracted from other articles on this subject. The references and additional reading material are listed elsewhere in this series. From the late 1800s and early 1900s - until the present - American physicians, most often with the support and funding of the US government and military, have been illegally experimenting with pregnant mothers, babies and young children, infecting them with various pathogens, and often killing their unwitting "subjects" in the process. In 1895, the New York pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two "idiots" (mentally disabled boys) - one 4-year-old and one 16-year old - with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to discover if doing so would be harmful. In Hawaii, a California physician injected twelve young girls under the age of 12 with syphilis. John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, infected about 700 people, including orphan children, as part of the study sponsored by the US Public Health Service and the World Health Organization. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the US. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th century found that there were more than forty reports of experimental infections of children with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children. In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent's House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children, and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the other children. In the study, they referred to the children as "material used". From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis. Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children, and continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications. From 1988 until the present, American pharmaceutical companies moved their clinical trials overseas, to test the safety of drugs intended for American consumption, but to avoid civil and criminal liability for these illegal experiments. And with good reason, because many of their "tests" proved deadly, such as one in New Delhi where 49 babies died during a 30-month trial. From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on more than 500 children aged from 3–12 years. Electroconvulsive treatment was used at Bellevue Hospital until and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service until 1969. Children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments. Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, who conducted some of the most reprehensible experiments for the CIA's MK-ULTRA project, saw to it that many of the children in his "care" were also sexually abused, often by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MK-ULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments. The US military funded experiments like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children and injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals to study the transmission of radioactivity and pathogens through the placental barrier. Immediately after World War II, researchers at Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of their babies. In fact, the 'drinks' were mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. Many children died from cancers and leukemias. From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children did not know they were being fed radioactive chemicals, and were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club". In 1953, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the University of Iowa. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women radioactive iodine-131 - knowing this would cause spontaneous abortions - in order to study the women's aborted embryos to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. At Harvard University, researchers began performing experiments where they tested diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, on pregnant women at the University of Chicago. The women experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight. None of the women were told that they were being experimented on. In none of the cases above, nor in other similar events, did any of these so-called government researchers face sanction for their crimes. Instead, the Department of Defense colluded with the Department of Justice to ensure no one was ever called to account. And, so it doesn't go unsaid, in none of these cases, was there any concerned discussion of "human rights". Return to Index |