First, Tuskegee; Now Foster Children...Why Blacks Mistrust Medical Studies

[Ian David]

Commentary: First, Tuskegee; Now Foster Children – And They Wonder Why Blacks Mistrust Medical Studies?

Date: Sunday, May 08, 2005
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Higher participation in clinical trials is said to be one path to curing the persistent health problems that plague black America –- killers like hypertension, diabetes and HIV-AIDS.

On the whole, we don’t sign up for such controlled medical experiments because, one, we often don’t know about them and, two, even when we do, we tend not to trust them.

After all, the old ghost of intentional malpractice still stalks the black community. Many of us still quake with disgust and rage over the Tuskegee Study, that 40-year experiment that began in 1932 when the U.S. Health Service offered free treatment for men with “bad blood.”

Unbeknownst to them, black men with syphilis didn’t get real help. The government faked it, offering placebos and other inappropriate therapies because researchers wanted to study the disease, not cure it.

<snip>

Now, the Associated Press is reporting that over the last decade, “mostly poor or minority” foster children with HIV were subjected to medical trials, treated with drugs “that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.”

According to the AP, most of the research occurred in the 1990s, covering seven states, and tapping infants to teenagers. Even though the treatment was said to be top-notch, the children were largely at the mercy of clinicians. Reportedly, some of them did not have advocates –- someone to look out for them during the term of the trial, which is, by definition, risky.

More:
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/mathis509



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