The AP is reporting that government funded aids researchers have used foster children in drug experiments within the area of aids research without affording the children protections guaranteed by law and regulation.
The experiments may have extended the lives of the mostly impoverished, minority children while providing them care from some of the world's leading researchers. However, it also exposed them to families of drugs known to have serious side affects in adults and not always yet approved for use in children.
The research was conducted in at least seven states - Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas - and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.
Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.
In one study, researchers reported a "disturbing" higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.
Documents and a video related to this development can be found at this location.
What is at issue is how frequently or infrequently medical researchers adhered to Federal Law in pursuing the research with foster children. Each child should have been appointed an objective advocate to ensure that the child stood to benefit from the experiments and participating was worth the risk. In many cases such advocates were never appointed and it is being suggested that, in some cases, the scientifically dominated research groups were long on experimentation and short on ethics, or adhering to the letter of the law.
Comments