Believe it now?

[Dealey Joe]

IT TOOK SIXTY YEARS FOR THIS TO GET OUT?IS ANYBODY (BESIDES MCADAMS) STILL SHAKING THEIR HEADS ABOUT THE CANCER EXPERIMENT AT EAST LOUISIANA STATE HOSPITAL (MENTAL HOSPITAL) AT JACKSON, WHERE THE BIOWEAPON AGAINST CASTRO WAS TESTED ON ONE OR MORE HAPLESS PRISONERS ('VOLUNTEERS') FROM ANGOLA?READ, BELOW, ABOUT THE LATEST INSTANCE OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS USING MENTAL PATIENTS IN ABUSIVE MEDICAL 'EXPERIMENTS' --AND TELL THE PEOPLE --THROUGH YOUR BLOGS--CAUSES--WEBSITES HOW THIS IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG! REMIND THEM THAT DR. MARY'S MONKEY AND ME & LEE WILL SHOW HOW THESE OUTRAGEOUS 'EXPERIMENTS' CAME TO PASS!( THE ARTICLE BELOW WAS from Edgar Tatro... )WASHINGTON — American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over "such reprehensible research."The discovery dredges up past wrongs in the name of science — like the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in this country that has long dampened minority participation in medical research — and could complicate ongoing studies overseas that depend on cooperation from some of the world's poorest countries to tackle tough-to-treat diseases.Uncovering it gives "us all a chance to look at this and — even as we are appalled at what was done — to redouble our efforts to make sure something like this could never happen again," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.The NIH-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was uncovered by a Wellesley College medical historian. It apparently was conducted to test if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent some sexually transmitted infections. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades."We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday.President Barack Obama called Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom, later Friday to apologize. Clinton had called to apologize the night before."Obviously this is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "It's tragic and the U.S. by all means apologizes to all those who were impacted."Guatemalan Embassy official Fernando de la Cerda said his country hadn't known anything about the experiment until Clinton called to apologize Thursday night."We appreciate this gesture from the USA, acknowledging the mistake and apologizing," he said. "This must not affect the bilateral relationship."Strict regulations today make clear that it is unethical to experiment on people without their consent, and require special steps for any work with such vulnerable populations as prisoners. But such regulations didn't exist in the 1940s.The U.S. government ordered two independent investigations to uncover exactly what happened in Guatemala and to make sure current bioethics rules are adequate. They will be led by the prestigious Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.Wellesley College historian Susan Reverby made the discovery while combing the archived records of Dr. John Cutler, a government researcher involved in the Tuskegee study that from 1932 to 1972 tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis without ever offering them treatment.She discovered that Cutler also led the Guatemala project that went a step further: A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea — through jail visits by prostitutes or, when that didn't infect enough people, by deliberately inoculating them. They were offered penicillin, but it wasn't clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated.She reported that the U.S. had gained permission from Guatemalan officials to conduct the study, but did not inform the experimental subjects.While secretly trying to infect people with serious diseases is abhorrent today, the Guatemalan experiment isn't the only example from what Collins on Friday called "a dark chapter in the history of medicine." Forty similar deliberate-infection studies were conducted in the United States during that period, Collins said."We've made some obvious moral progress" in protecting the poor and powerless, said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist. "The sad legacy" of past unethical experiments is that "they still shape who it is that we can get to trust medical researchers."A continuing ethical dilemma in developing countries is what Caplan calls the "left-behind syndrome," when the people who helped test a treatment can never afford the resulting care."It's still ethically contentious as to how we ought to conduct, or whether we ought to conduct, certain forms of research in poor nations today," he said.Reverby, whose work was first reported by NBC News, made the discovery last year and gave a speech about it at a medical historians' meeting in May, which a U.S. health official heard. She provided her findings to the government the next month, resulting in Friday's apology, and has posted them on her website.The revelation of abuses by a U.S. medical research program is only the latest chapter in the United States' troubled history with the impoverished Central American nation, which has a per capita gross domestic product about half of that of the rest of Central America and the Caribbean.The U.S. helped topple the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and backed several hardline governments during a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996 and cost 200,000 lives.Judyth Vary Baker

[ChristophMessner]

It's good to remind people of old sins and show solutions for a better future. The nazis killed some million jews, Stalin killed some million enemies of state, Mao killed some million by chaos politics, .... and nevertheless we all can overcome all this only if we play jazz, do arts, enjoy life and engage in the good things and not in the bad things.

[Dealey Joe]

BLOOMBERGRelated News:Science ·Health CareMonkey Virus That Led to AIDS at Least 32,000 Years Old, Researchers SayBy Rob Waters - Sep 16, 2010 10:22 PM GMT+0200EmailSharePrintThe virus that afflicts monkeys and evolved into HIV to cause AIDS in people is at least 32,000 years old and may be as much as 1 million years old, making it far more ancient than researchers previously believed.Simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, was identified 17 years ago as the likely origin of human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. Researchers had thought the monkey virus was only a few hundred years old, based on DNA studies. The new findings, led by scientists at Tulane University in New Orleans, were based on genetic analysis of monkeys on Bioko Island, which separated from mainland Africa more than 10,000 years ago.Unlike HIV, the simian version of the virus doesn’t cause disease in monkeys. The findings, published today in the journal Science, suggest that it took many thousands of years for the monkey virus to evolve into a form that’s not harmful and that HIV also may take some time to achieve a similar transformation. The study also raises the question about what happened in recent times to make the virus lethal to people.“Something happened in the 20th century to change this relatively benign monkey virus into something that was much more potent and could start the epidemic,” Preston Marx, the Tulane researcher who led the study, said in a statement. “We don’t know what that flashpoint was but there had to be one.”Marx and his colleagues collected tissue samples from monkeys on the island, found four strains of SIV and compared them to the very different strains found on the mainland. Computer models that assessed the rate of DNA change over time found the virus had to be at least 32,000 years old and probably much older.To contact the reporter on this story: Rob Waters in San Francisco at rwaters5@bloomberg.net.

[Jsnow915]

wow....we had chemical warfare with someone we werent at war with...who is held responsible?....please accept our apology?...we didnt mean it...amazing to find out 60 years later that this was done...what other crimes were committed?...will we find out in years to come what McCain meant about JFK's assassination being an intervention?

[Bob]

Excellent stuff Joe. By the way, guess where Saddam got his mustard gas that killed thousands of Kurds? From the United States of America...namely Ronny Reagan and Poppy Bu$h. The U.S.A. also gave Saddam other weaponry in his fight vs. Iran, plus also help arm a guy named Osama and his al qaeda guys as they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

[Mark68]

Bob wrote:Excellent stuff Joe. By the way, guess where Saddam got his mustard gas that killed thousands of Kurds? From the United States of America...namely Ronny Reagan and Poppy Bu$h. The U.S.A. also gave Saddam other weaponry in his fight vs. Iran, plus also help arm a guy named Osama and his al qaeda guys as they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.^ Yep. I just saw on 60 Minutes last nite where at the Iran/Iraq border a line of fuel 18 wheel trucks at least a mile long transporting tens of thousands barrels of unrefined crude against the law into Iran on a DAILY basis. This is yet another of numerous, numerous examples of an incredibly flawed "democratic" plan. I wonder if the avg on the street Iraqi would agree things are better under the US rather than Saddam. JFK was sooo far ahead of his time its no wonder the powers that be (used collectively) killed him. If anyone would argue we are not a Pax Americana right now as things stand that person is clearly an idiot.