Orphans and babies as young as three months old have been used as guinea pigs in potentially dangerous medical experiments sponsored by a giant pharmaceutical company.
British giant GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in the scandal.
The firm sponsored experiments on the children from Incarnation Children's Center, a New York care home that specializes in treating HIV sufferers and is run by Catholic charities.
The children had either been infected with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers.
Their parents were dead, untraceable or deemed unfit to look after them.
According to documents, Glaxo has sponsored at least four medical trials since 1995 using Hispanic and black children at Incarnation.
The documents give details of all clinical trials in the US and reveal that the experiments sponsored by Glaxo were designed to test the "safety and tolerance" of AIDS medications, some of which have potentially dangerous side effects.
Glaxo manufactures a number of drugs designed to treat HIV, including AZT.
Normally, trials on children would require parental consent but, as the infants are in care, New York's authorities hold that role.
The city health department has launched an investigation into claims that more than 100 children at Incarnation were used in 36 experiments -- at least four of them co-sponsored by Glaxo.
Some of these trials were designed to test the "toxicity" of AIDS medications.
One involved giving children as young as 4 years old a high-dosage cocktail of seven drugs at one time.
Another looked at the reaction in six-month-old babies to a double dose of measles vaccine.
Most experiments were funded by federal agencies like the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Until now Glaxo's role had not emerged.
In 1997 an experiment co-sponsored by Glaxo used children from Incarnation to "obtain tolerance, safety and pharmacokinetic" data for herpes drugs.
In a more recent experiment, the children were used to test the drug AZT.
A third experiment sponsored by Glaxo and US drug firm Pfizer investigated the "long-term safety" of anti-bacterial drugs on three-month-old babies.
The medical establishment has defended the trials, arguing they enabled these children to obtain state-of-the-art therapy that they would otherwise not have received for illnesses that could potentially be fatal.
However, health campaigners argue there is a difference between providing the latest drugs and experimentation.
They claim many of the experiments were "phase 1 trials" -- among the most risky.
They also claim that HIV tests for babies are not a reliable indicator of actual infection and therefore toxic drugs could have been given to healthy infants. HIV drugs are similar to those used in chemotherapy and can have serious side effects.
Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, said the children had been treated like "laboratory animals."
"These are some of the most vulnerable individuals in the country and there appears to be a policy of giving drug firms access to them," she said.
"Throughout the history of medical research we have seen prisoners abused, the mentally ill abused and now poor kids in a care home," she said.
Sharav has urged the US Food and Drug Administration to investigate and has demanded complete disclosure of all adverse effects suffered by the children, including deaths.
Glaxo has confirmed it provided funds for some of the experiments but denied any improper action.
A spokeswoman said, "These studies were implemented by the US AIDS Clinical Trial Group, a clinical research network paid for by the National Institutes of Health.
"Glaxo's involvement in such studies would have been to provide study drugs or funding but we would have no interactions with the patients.
"Generally speaking, clinical research is carefully regulated in the US and it would be the responsibility of the appropriate authorities to ensure all subjects in a clinical trial provided appropriate, informed consent to conform with all local laws and regulations regarding legal authority in the case of minors."
The Incarnation trials were run by Columbia University Medical Center doctors.
Columbia spokeswoman Annie Bayne said there had been no clinical trials at Incarnation since 2000 and that consent for the children was provided by the Administration for Children's Services, which relies on a panel of doctors and lawyers to determine whether the benefits of a trial for each child outweighs the risks to the child.
"There are many safeguards in the system. HIV is eventually a fatal disease, but drug therapy has lengthened life significantly," Bayne said.
A spokesman for Incarnation said regarding the scandal, "The purpose of the trials was to test the efficacy of HIV medication."
"These trials were based on scientific evidence of their potential value in the treatment of HIV- infected children," the spokesman said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS