Nazis, Human Experimentation and Diet Coke
During the German Nazi regime, human experimentation was carried out on large numbers of prisoners in concentration camps throughout World War II.
Experiments at Dachau concentration camp from 1942 to 1945, investigated immunization for treatment of malaria. Healthy inmates were infected by mosquitoes and after contracting the disease, the subjects were treated with various drugs to test their relative efficiency. Over 1,000 people were used in these experiments, and of those, more than half died as a result.(1)
At Buchenwald concentration camp during 1943 and 1944, experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of various poisons. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental subjects in their food – the victims died as a result. (2)
Doctors’ Trial
On August 19, 1947, the Nazi doctors captured by Allied forces were put on trial in USA vs. Karl Brandt et al., which is commonly known as the Doctors’ Trial. At the trial, several of the doctors argued in their defense that there was no international law regarding medical experimentation. (3)
In response, a ten point memorandum was drafted entitled Permissible Medical Experiment. It went on to be known as the Nuremberg Code. The code calls for such standards as;
- voluntary consent of patients
- avoidance of unnecessary pain and suffering, and
- there must be a belief that the experimentation will not end in death or disability.
Point 7 of the code stated;
Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
However, the Code was not cited in any of the findings against the defendants and never made it into either German or American medical law. (4)
Was it because human experimentation was secretly being carried out in America?
This became evident during the trial when the chief prosecution witness, Dr Andrew C Ivy of the medical school of the University of Illinois, emphasized the basic principle “that human experimental subjects must be volunteers”.
Dr Rose and his defense counsel objected strongly, arguing that the US was guilty of similar medical practices and giving several examples to support this contention. (5)
One such example is a series of experiments conducted in 1944 in a Chicago prison where 441 convicts were infected with malaria.
British Medical Journal commentary
One of the nicest American scientists I know was heard to say: ‘Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material – and much cheaper than chimpanzees’. (6)
Human Guinea Pigs in America
While Nazi experimentation came to a halt, it flourished in America.
Postwar American research grew rapidly as prisoners became part of a lucrative system.
For example, in the last year of the war, the National Institute of Health received about $700 000, which climbed to $36 million by 1955, and over 10 times that just 10 years later. In 1970, $1.5 billion was awarded to some 11 000 grant applicants, nearly a third of them performing experimentation.
Mostly uneducated and financially desperate prisoners “volunteered” for these medical experiments that ranged from tropical and sexually transmitted diseases to polio, cancer, and chemical warfare. (7)
However, it was not only prisoners that were used. In 1949, the Quaker Oats Company, the National Institute of Health, and the Atomic Energy Commission fed minute doses of radioactive materials to boys at the Fernald School for the mentally retarded in Waltham, Massachusetts via breakfast cereal. The subjects were told that they were joining a science club. The consent form sent to the boys’ parents made no mention of the radiation experiment. (8)
Another study that gained national prominence was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. This was a 40-year government study in which 399 Black men from Macon County, Alabama were deliberately denied effective treatment for syphilis because the United States Public Health Service wanted to, in their words, “document the natural history of the disease”.
The Public Health Service leaders’ excuse was that with the advent of antibiotics, no one would ever again be able to trace the long term effects of the disease. The press reported that as of 1969, at least 28, and perhaps as many as 100 men, had died as a direct result of complications caused by syphilis.
As one of the longest medical studies in history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study continued until 1976 despite having been openly discussed in conferences at professional meetings. According to Perspectives in Medical Sociology;
“It continued despite more than a dozen articles appearing in some of the nation’s best medical journals, which described the study to a combined readership of well over a hundred thousand physicians.”
Following outrage over this and other cases of morally bankrupt research, legislation began to be introduced “to limit the use of prison inmates in medical research”. Prison research programs were being terminated, especially the more controversial ones such as the decade-long studies in Oregon and Washington that irradiated the testicles of prison inmates.(9)
Even physicians who had been long time advocates of the practice were forced to concede that “scientific investigators and drug companies could continue their work without the use of prisoners”. (10)
Less than a year later, the federal government announced the end of medical research on federal prisoners.
Clinical Trials
Today, there are 40,000 clinical trials ongoing in the US, with 20 million Americans being recruited into clinical trails annually by universities, medical centers and drug companies. Some have cancer or other illnesses that are threatening their lives, but some aren’t sick.
Each year, US scientists require a total of at least 10 million healthy test subjects, says Adil Shamoo, chair of Circare, a human research watchdog organization. Depending on duration, rigor, and risk, medical studies can pay as much as $10,000 each. (11)
It’s an easy way to supplement poor folk with extra income – but a risky way.
In March 2006, eight male volunteers checked into London’s Northwick Park Hospital for a week-long study of TGN1412, an experimental treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and leukemia to be manufactured by Boehringer- Ingelheim. Within minutes of receiving the first dose, six of them began to writhe in pain, vomit, and lose consciousness.
Within hours, the men’s bodies were suffering multiple organ failures. The test subjects lived, but all suffered permanent damage to their immune systems and internal organs. One lost fingers and toes. The six men face lifelong health problems, including an increased likelihood of developing cancer and autoimmune diseases. (12)
It was the first time the drug, which was injected at a dose 500 times lower than the amount found to be safe in animals, had been given to humans.
However, this type of human experimentation could become a thing of the past.
Chemical Tests
Under proposed changes to federal research ethics standards, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will no longer accept studies that use people as guinea pigs in chemical tests. In 2006, under chemical-industry pressure, the EPA declared such data acceptable. On June 16, the EPA reversed its decision. (13)
What we were really concerned about is toxicity studies, where they’re trying to do a study on humans to determine the dose response of a chemical, said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
“If the EPA stops accepting them, there’s no motivation for companies to conduct them.”
The chemical industry, however, has long argued that the EPA should accept data from tests in which healthy volunteers are paid for exposing themselves to pesticides and other known toxins. The industry says such data provide a more accurate picture of chemical effects than animal studies.
In a 2005 report on the industry’s tests, senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote;
These pesticides are intentionally designed to be toxic. Their whole purpose is to kill insects and invasive plants. Yet in the experiments, test subjects swallowed insecticide tablets, sat in chambers with pesticide vapors, had pesticides applied to their skin, had pesticides shot into their eyes and noses, and were even exposed in their homes for six months at a time.
Continued Waxman and Boxer;
The subjects were not told of the dangers of exposure to the pesticides. Sometimes, they weren’t even told the substances being tested were pesticides. They were misled into believing that they were participating in ‘drug’ trials, not pesticide experiments.
Despite this report, the EPA decided to accept data from these studies. The NRDC, along with nonprofits Pesticide Action Network and Earthjustice, filed suit in federal court.
As a result of negotiations during the ensuing legal battle, the EPA reversed its decision and the rules will be opened to public comment in January of 2011, and will need court approval to finally become law.
They extend protections from the Common Rule (a widely accepted set of medical ethics that forbid intentional-dosing studies that have no benefit) to all people involved in EPA-accepted studies. Extra protections are given to children and pregnant women.
“EPA expects its tougher new rules will decrease the number of systemic intentional dosing toxicity studies conducted for pesticides,” reads the EPA website. “We expect the number of systemic toxicity studies to drop to as few as zero or one per year.”
Pesticide companies should not be allowed to take advantage of vulnerable populations by enticing people to serve as human laboratory rats, said Pesticide Action Network senior scientist, Margaret Reeves in a press release.
According to Jennifer Sass of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), some data on human exposures to chemicals may still be used. Reports from accidental poisonings, worker exposures and other unintentional dosing exist, and the “EPA could incorporate a lot of that unfortunate, real-world data,” she said.
Diet Drinks and Pregnancy
Perhaps this real world data should include the latest findings from Dr. Thorhallur I. Halldorsson of the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Denmark whose research team noted that while “Diet” drinks are widely promoted as a healthy alternative to sugary sodas and juices, there’s been little research on the safety of regular consumption of artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, in humans.
The researchers state soft drinks, both artificially sweetened and sugar sweetened, were recently linked to high blood pressure, which increases the risk of premature delivery. To investigate whether there might be a direct link, the researchers looked at nearly 60,000 Danish women who reported on their diet, including how many soft drinks they had each day, at around 25 weeks of pregnancy. (14)
Women who had at least one serving of artificially sweetened soda a day while they were pregnant were 38 percent more likely to deliver preterm than women who drank no diet soda at all, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Women who had at least four diet sodas a day were nearly 80 percent more likely to deliver preterm. The association was the same for normal-weight and overweight women.
Premature Births
The shorter the term of pregnancy, the greater the risks of mortality and morbidity for the baby primarily due to the related prematurity. Preterm-premature babies have an increased risk of death in the first year of life (infant mortality), with most of that occurring in the first month of life (neonatal mortality). (15)
Worldwide, prematurity accounts for 10 percent of neonatal mortality, or around 500,000 deaths per year. In the US, prematurity is the leading cause of neonatal mortality at 25 percent. Prematurely born infants are also at greater risk for having subsequent serious chronic health problems. (16)
These health problems were highlighted by Dr. Neil Marlow, a neonatologist at the University of Nottingham in England. Marlow and his colleagues looked at 241 children of about 6 years of age who had been born between 22 and 25 weeks. Normal pregnancy is 37 to 42 weeks.
They found that;
- 46 percent had severe or moderate disabilities such as cerebral palsy, vision or hearing loss and learning problems
- 34 percent were mildly disabled
- 20 percent had no disabilities, and
- 12 percent had disabling cerebral palsy. (17)
It’s important to realize that prematurity is a major public health problem. One in eight babies are born prematurely, said Dr. Scott Berns of the March of Dimes.
In a statement, the Calorie Control Council, a lobbying group for companies that make and distribute low-calorie foods, called the study “misleading”.
Beth Hubrich, a dietitian with the council, said;
“This study may unduly alarm pregnant women. While this study is counter to the weight of the scientific evidence demonstrating that low-calorie sweeteners are safe for use in pregnancy, research has shown that overweight and obesity can negatively affect pregnancy outcomes. Further, low-calorie sweeteners can help pregnant women enjoy the taste of sweets without excess calories, leaving room for nutritious foods and beverages without excess weight gain – something that has been shown to be harmful to both the mother and developing baby.”
However, Halldorsson and his colleagues say there is also indirect evidence linking the sweetener aspartame to preterm delivery in animals. Aspartame breaks down into methanol and other substances in the body, which can in turn be converted to toxic substances such as formaldehyde and formic acid, the researchers explain. And studies in non-human primates have linked even very low exposure to methanol to shortened pregnancy and labor complications.
While pregnant women who consume soft drinks shouldn’t be alarmed by the findings, Halldorsson said,
what we are seeing warrants further attention.
In the meantime, pregnant women and children become present day experimental subjects.
Doesn’t point 7 of the Nuremburg Code apply in this instance?
Surely the evidence of Halldorsson and his colleagues shows there is ‘a remote possibility of injury, disability, or death’ connected with the consumption of aspartame.
If, in the future, aspartame is found to be dangerous, shouldn’t the people responsible be held accountable – like the Nazi doctors?
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