After leaving today's class, I felt as though we had left an important issue and subject untouched, or only briefly mentioned. We discussed the Tuskegee Study and how it was this horrible experimentation that involved hundreds of low-income black men that were kept misinformed and treatment was withheld. It was brought up a few times that this is surprisingly recent, continuing all the way into the early 1970's. While it is important to note the progress in the area of medical ethics that has come out of this, we shouldn't be naive to believe that there are no longer issues related to human medical experiments and the ethics behind the studies we may or may not hear about. The exposure of the Tuskegee Study in 1972 was sadly not the end of the use of humans as a test subject. There are various accounts that reach all the way to present day of experimentation done of human beings. These studies overwhelmingly use mentally disabled patients who are either not given the choice of consent or do give consent, but may not understand the extent to what they are signing. I found other studies that included children, the majority of whom were minorities. It's hard to overlook the situation when you read about a study in which 1500 six-month old Hispanic and black infants were injected with an experimental measles vaccine that had not been licensed in the United States. The parents were never informed that the vaccination was experimental. This took place in 1990. There are more examples that are even more recent than this.
At the end of class testing outside the United States was again mentioned. I think this is a very important thing to remember. We've made these rules about the ethics of medicine and human experimentation, but if they aren't being followed or aren't working all the time in the United States, is there anything that can be done outside the US? This similar issue was seen in the movie, "La Operacion" and our discussion that stemmed from that. The same rules don't seem to apply in Puerto Rico, and that's a territory of the United States. I would hope that the companies that are doing these testings would have enough respect for human life, but unfortunately we've been shown time and time again that they have not. I don't know whose responsibility is it to monitor these fields, but I'd be interested in finding out how it all works. We continue to bring up throughout all our discussions the fact that we have to take the time period into account and that this could never happen now because there would be an uproar. As we keep saying this the questions comes to my mind, "would there really be an uproar?" If that was true, wouldn't we have heard about some of the more recent issues. I personally hadn't heard about the whole Pfizer testing in Africa until this class. I can't speak for everyone and this may be my fault for not staying up on the news as best I should, but there doesn't seem to be the uproar that we assumed there would be. We (as a society) always seem to look back in history and say "we'll never let that happen again, if that was now we would stand up and demand change." I don't want to be such a downer, but the I can't stop thinking that it's just a bunch of words. Not to say that we haven't progressed, because we have, but a lot of the issues that were around "back then" and that we said we would change are still around. They may have taken a different form, but that doesn't mean that they've gone away. Something to keep in mind.