Researchers Tested Drugs on Foster Kids

AP via Yahoo! ^ | 5-4-05 | JOHN SOLOMON

[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.

[AdamSelene235]

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.

It was never "the prevailing knowledge" it was the prevailing political position.

HIV was never proven to be the cause of AIDS in any scientific paper, this was announced in a NIH press conference by Bob Gallo who had stolen the virus and had a history of falsely attritributing diseases to harmless retroviruses.

Politics not knowledge.

[Spirited]

"It was never "the prevailing knowledge" it was the prevailing political position."

Thanks for all your posts, but particularly this quote. Aids has been more politicized than any health problem that we have ever had. It doesn't seem to have been accidental, either.

We rarely have truths posted here depending on the subject. The crowd doesn't usually stand for it. Thanks again.

What you've posted is worth passing on. It's particularly important for young people to understand that nearly all research and most remedies are brought forth under the rod of politics.

[TASMANIANRED]

I have had to take the human research course on ethical human studies.

To test a drug in a child there must be a compelling reason.
The benefit has to out weigh the risk.

Since the risk of the disease with no treatment is death, I am not sure any outrage is justified.

The foster parents gave consent to treatment.

[No Longer Free State]

This is what our tax dollars are going towards. And the radical homo/aids activists are bitching that we're not spending enough money to save their sorry asses.

[mlmr]

Let us put this in context.

These children had AIDS and all treatment was experimental at that time. It was deemed that these children would die without treatment and it was tried.

[AdamSelene235]

Since the risk of the disease with no treatment is death, I am not sure any outrage is justified.

What disease?

These kids do not have an HIV "infection". There was no detectable HIV in their bodies. All they have are is a positive result on an antibody test.

Furthermore, the antibody test was not developed using isolated HIV. Because nobody had isolated HIV when they developed the test.

There was no reason to believe these kids were any danger whatsoever.

We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses. They're everywhere -- and they probably have been here as long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses -- infectious viral particles that can move from mother to fetus. We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles some of the time. Some of them may look like H.I.V. No one has shown that they've ever killed anyone before. -Kary Mullis, Nobelist, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction.

More on the subject: HIV; REALITY OR ARTEFACT

[AdamSelene235]

These children had AIDS and all treatment was experimental at that time.

They did not have AIDS, they had positive antibody test. A positive test to a stolen, unisolated (meaning the positive test was meaningless) pathogen (sic) that had never been shown to harm anyone.