Try your reading comprehension on this:
Posted on 05/04/2005 1:47:47 PM PDT by jcb8199
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. ADVERTISEMENT
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.
The research was conducted in at least seven states — Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas — and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.
Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.
In one study, researchers reported a "disturbing" higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
"The practice ensured that foster children — mostly poor or minority"
Do these authors,and their editors, have a brain?
How many 'rich' foster children are there?
It extended their lives. There will be more on this matter, I'm sure, and I'll wait to hear more about it.
These foster kids had HIV. Don't mention the parents who put these kids on death row. Look on all sides of the coin please!!
We think alike.
The following seems to imply that it would be less of a problem if middle class or white foster children were involved.
"The practice ensured that foster children — mostly poor or minority — received care from world-class researchers at government expense,"
MisterRepublican wrote:
"It was most widespread in the 1990s..."
A point that will have to be edited out of any further reports. Everyone knows bad things didn't happen during the Clinton co-presidency.
--> MJackson was experimenting with little kids too...that was in the 90's under Clinton's watch. DoubleWhammy!
How do you know that?
That's what I was gonna say. PETA wouldn't let them test them on animals!
Well, there was Little Orphan Annie!
Seriously, these kids were given a death sentence when their parent(s) engaged in the high risk behavior that gave them the disease. Anything that would have mitigated their symptoms, either for their direct benefit, or the suffering that their foster families had to endure was worth it.
Strip this down to brass tacks, and all boils down to is potential ambulance chasing by a pack of lawyers that should all be dead of AIDS themselves.
Given nobody has proven HIV causes AIDS, I don't see how poisoning kids with DNA chain terminators provides any benefit.
Paragraph #3:
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
I see, so if JOHN SOLOMON of AP news says it, it must be true.
What the hell is wrong with you people? Must your tone always be so nasty.
I quoted from the article and my first post said that I would wait and see what future articles said. shaking my head
Reading comprehension is your friend.
Unlike you, I haven't said anything uncivil.
The drugs were experimental, which is to say, they didn't know if the kids lives would be extended. In fact, since nobody has ever demonstrated merely having HIV antibodies is a health risk in itself, I find it likely these kids were needlessly poisoned.
Try your reading comprehension on this:
Seeing as how the government has engaged in testing of various sorts (radiation, anti-syphilitic drugs, various vaccines, the SHAD testing, biowarfare sims) without any "informed consent, I see no difference in methodology here.
This being said, and not knowing if the foster parents were notified of the testing of the drugs, there might be somewhat of a beneficent motive in this. If these children were indeed those of a high=risk demographic, and given that once full blown AIDS developed one was in a basic sure-death category anyway, then the use of experimental drugs to slow down or stop the growth or spread of the virus would be acceptable, provided that such tests were done with informed consent and the full knowledge of everyone concerned.
Given the report's statement that "most of the testing was done during the 1990's during the Xlintoon watch, makes me highly suspicious of both the motive, the method, and the outcome as reported. Since the X42 administration lied about everything else, there is nothing here which would make me believe the veracity of this.
I also find the use of "foster children" rather suspicious", as reading between the lines, I rather suspect the researchers' first thought would be "disposable subjects".
While I believe that a cure for AIDS is a desirable goal, I also feel that there are any number of other fatal illnesses and conditions that could use some of the funding and hype that are being thrown at AIDS, and that much more effort should be given to the prevention of the spread of this disease, which, if Political Correctness were allowed to be ignored, and facts could be "told like they are" the process of getting the word out about just who the "high risk" demographic is, and how this spread could be prevented, would be much, much easier, than having to tiptoe around the minefield of the multicolored flag.
Keep the faith for Freedom
Greg
I think it stinks of an old therapy they used to use against syphilis: arsenic. The syphilis was surely going to kill you, the arsenic might kill you, but maybe it would kill the syphilis first and you would live to fraternize again. The use of poisonous chemotherapeutics in cancer follows the same line. The cancer is surely going to kill you. The chemotherapeutic surely will also, but maybe it will kill the cancer cells before it kills you. It's a gamble. We will give you almost enough to kill you and hope it's sufficient to kill the cancer. I wouldn't go for it myself. I don't need to take drugs that make my hair fall out. But what the hell, if somebody wants to take this kind of gamble, it does have a sort of logic to it. Nothing fun. Nothing you would do for a headache. But it's a chance somebody might want to take when the alternative is to die too young to watch their kids grow up. And some people do recover from cancer even after they have taken chemotherapeutics.
In the case of AIDS, the same strategy took a diabolic trurn. AIDS might kill you, A.Z.T. might also. It will surely make you sick. It will prevent the proliferation of any rapidly growing cells in your body, including the CD-4 immune cells that your doctor thinks you need now more that anything. It may kill the H.I.V. It kills it in petri dishes. But that may not cure you. The damage to you may have already been done, whatever it is. The complete absence of all H.I.V. from your body, even if it is accomplished, may not cure you of AIDS. No one has ever recovered from AIDS, even though they have recovered from H.I.V. And we are not going to give it to you in a limited dose as we do in the case of cancer chemotherapy, where we are gambling that although we are hurting you, we are hurting the cancer more and maybe you will survive longer. Here we are not gambling. No one has ever recovered from AIDS. We cannot expect that you might recover. We are going to ask you to swallow this poison until you die.
About half a million people went for it. No one has been cured. Most of them are dead. The ones who are not are also taking another drug now, a protease inhibitor. Who knows what it will do? The manufacturers didn't know when they started selling it. The FD.A. didn't require them to show that it would cure AIDS and not kill the patient, any more than they required them to show that about A.Z.T. They only required that a surrogate goal be met. A surrogate goal means that something that we think may be related to the disease in question may be improved by the drug, like the level of CD-4 cells, whatever the *** they are. It's a way to get around the notion that a drug ought to be effective in curing the disease that it is sold for before it can be sold. The surrogate-goal bullshit is an indication that our F.D.A. no longer serves our needs. Or at least it does not serve our needs unless we own stock in the pharmaceutical industry and don't give a *** about health care.
Whether that's true or not (and I still think that HIV and AIDS are related), it was the prevailing knowledge at the time, and was the best possible known path to effectuate treatment.
Medical science goes up a lot of blind alleys before finding the way out, and I don't blame anyone for trying something that didn't work. A bunch of shysters shouldn't make out like bandits just because someone might have cut a minor corner on trying to fix these kids' problems.
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