Archive Post "Betraying Hippocrates" Apr 2007
| Betraying Hippocrates. The Medical Political Complex....(Repost from April 2007) | for everyone |
- Entry for 18 April 2007 Yahoo 360
Who Needs Dr Mengele?
Medical Abuses in the Name of Science
- Preface: I am currently working nights and so am less able to post new material at the moment, although there is plenty to blog about.... not least today's news in the UK that 3 men have been arrested for threatening to kill Gordon Brown.
- This must be one of the greatest acts of futility ever conceived (or perhaps fabricated by MI5 and the corporate media?)...why anyone would want to kill a man who is so busy committing political suicide is completely beyond me?
- A scandal of horrendous proportions is presently unfolding in the British media. The BBC television programme 'Newsnight' last night revealed the way in which UK scientists ignored warnings of contaminated blood products in 1970s and 80s. The result was that 4.500 British haemophilia patients were exposed to lethal viruses in blood products during that period. Around two thousand have since died of either Hepatitis C or HIV/AIDS.
What is particularly disturbing about this story is the claim that doctors 'volunteered' their patients for AIDS trials in the UK without their knowledge or consent, in collaboration with American AIDS researchers.
The defense is that doctors did not know that the clotting agent Factor 8 they prescribed for patients was obtained from the prison population in the United States who donated blood for small payments. This Factor 8 was not heat treated and was subsequently responsible for infecting the UK haemophiliacs with hepatitis and HIV/AIDS.
One of those people affected, Robert Mackie was featured on the Newsnight programmeMr Mackie discovered by accident that his doctor, Professor Christopher Ludlam of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was doing a lot more than looking after patients.In a medical newsletter in 1990, Professor Ludlam described a unique group of patients in Scotland that had formed the basis of several years of important research he had published on Aids.When Mr Mackie saw this, he examined his records.He has discovered that although he was infected in 1984, he was not told until 1987.And strangely, the words "Aids study" were clearly written in his medical notes before he was infected.Mr Mackie is convinced he was part of scientific attempts to understand the virus behind Aids, but he was not told.
He has discovered that in April 1983 - before he was infected - Aids specialists at one of the US's top medical institutions wrote in the Lancet about how valuable it would be to locate a group of haemophilia patients in a country not yet affected by Aids.
The implication here is that British people suffering from haemophilia were deliberately exposed by doctors 'looking after' them to the AIDS virus, because they fitted the research profile of the medical researchers in the US.
For years this outrage has been covered up by successive British governments who would not allow a public enquiry and papers relating to the 'study' have allegedly been shredded.
Unfortunately for those who were involved not all copies of the papers relating to the study were destroyed and details have now been released to the BBC.
It may seem unbelievable that UK citizens have been used as human guinea pigs by foreign scientists apparently with the agreement of their own doctors, the connivance of the British government and elements within the scientific community in this country.
This so-called study released the HIV/AIDS virus within a group of people in Britain who were not otherwise at risk.
For further details please see BBC link below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6562909.stm
The arrogance and egotism of medics who believe themselves entitled to treat people in this way is absolutely staggering. It enormously damages the credibility of a profession which traditionally has enjoyed respect and not a little deference amongst the general population of the UK.
It is my view that too much deference has been shown to these doctors which has protected them from proper public scrutiny in Britain for much too long.
But how surprised should we be that this infected Factor 8 was released whether for research or economic reasons to wreak havoc on the lives of already sick people?
Medical experimentation and eugenics has a long and ignoble history all around the world. In Nazi Germany Dr Mengele and his colleagues advanced medical knowledge by undertaking experimental procedures on concentration camp victims by the thousands. Experiments done by Mengele and his team involved- Genetics
- Infectious Diseases
- Freezing / Hypothermia
- Interrogation and Torture
- Killing / Genocide
- High Altitude
- Pharmacological
- Sterilization
- Surgery
- Traumatic Injuries
Further information on link below. http://www.remember.org/educate/medexp.html
Not all medical experiments are as overtly sadistic as the operations performed by the Nazi doctors, but some come pretty close.America for example has a very long history of medical experimentation on unwilling subjects going back at least to the mid nineteenth century.
Between 1845 - 1849 J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynaecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia.
'News Target' has published a paper outlining numerous known instances of medical experimentation in the USA between 1833-1965 at the link here:-
http://www.newstarget.com/019189.htmlhttp://www.newstarget.com/019189.html.
This year by year account shows ways in which American doctors have moved from slaves to prisoners and mental hospital patients over more than 150 years of medical abuse.
Examples include:-(1906)Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).
(1919)
Between1919 - 1922, researchers perform testicular transplant experiments on inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, inserting the testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners (Greger).(1939)
In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous "Monster Experiment" on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, "in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career" (Alliance for Human Research Protection).
(1947)
Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that "certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract" (Goliszek).(1963)
Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving "some cells," but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn't obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).
In Britain throughout the nineteenth century the inmates of workhouses and asylums provided the raw materials in the form of their bodies and minds for doctors to practice upon, to develop techniques and treatments that when perfected could be sold to wealthy patients.
How long are we going to allow these doctors and researchers to get away with using the sick and the poor to experiment upon to further their careers and attract more research funding?
Why have ethics committees proved utterly impotent to prevent these abuses taking place?
What is required is greater democratic control over medicine and far more effective public scrutiny over doctors and physiologists.
After years of campaigning the British Haemophilia Society has forced this scandal into the public arena. At last it seems as if the pressure for a public enquiry into the AIDS study carried out in that community twenty to thirty years ago is irresistible.
Despite all their efforts to conceal the truth, the government and medical establishment is going to have to confront their role in introducing the AIDS virus into the UK back then. They will also have to answer for the way that medical practitioners have seemingly exposed innocent victims to debilitating illness and premature death because they could. They were that powerful!
This terrible chapter in British medical history is not going to go away, there will be a public enquiry and we shall see what effect that has on public perceptions of the Departmant of Health, the medical profession and the special relationship between the US and the UK scientific communities.
This is not the first time that populations have been deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS it happened in France to people with haemophilia in 1994 and again there was a case in Iran in 1999.
This is NOT acceptable, there must be prosecutions brought for what is reported to have taken place when culpability is established at the forthcoming enquiry.
There can be no more cover ups, no more abuses and justice must prevail for those infected and their families. It would appear that in Britain's medico-political estabishment heads are going to roll and not before time.
