Revealed: Children Used as Guinea Pigs in Contaminated Blood Experiments – BBC News Investigation

The true extent of the number of medical experiments that used contaminated blood products on children in the 1970s and 1980s has been revealed by documents seen by BBC News. They reveal the secret world of unsafe clinical trials involving children in the UK, and doctors putting research goals ahead of patients’ needs They told the BBC he was treated like a “guinea pig” . Most of the children who signed up are now dead to be imported from the US. High-risk donors, such as prisoners and drug addicts, gave plasma for treatments infected with potentially fatal viruses, including hepatitis C – which attacks the liver, causing cirrhosis and cancer – and HIV as one of the blood products, called Factor VIII, was thought to be highly effective in stopping bleeding, but is also known to be contaminated with viruses A public inquiry is underway into this scandal. The final report will be given in May being treated at Middlesex Hospital in central London for a small cut on his mouth aged three in 1985. Documents seen by the BBC suggest he was given the blood product on purpose – which his doctor knew could be infected – so that he could be enrolled in a clinical trial. Although he was never treated for his condition, Lucas was given heated Factor VIII to stop his mouth from bleeding. Writing to Peter Kernoff, of the Royal Free Hospital in London, Dr. Machin detailed the treatment of Luke and another boy, asking: “I hope they will be suitable for your trial with heat therapy.” Kernoff appealed to his medical colleagues in the field to identify suitable patients for clinical trials. In particular, he said, they were supposed to be “patients who have not been treated before,” called “PUP” in the medical community is a guinea pig in a clinical trial that could have killed me,” Luke told the BBC. “There’s no other way to explain it – my treatment was changed so I could be enrolled in clinical trials. This change in medicine gave me a fatal disease – hepatitis C – and yet my mother was never informed.” “For the scientific world, it was an incredible achievement being a hemophiliac virgin,” he said. “Being a clean petri dish through understanding the science, I’ve definitely been a part of that.” However, evidence from clinical trials has raised wider concerns that building informed consent – if these two factors were not met then a study would be considered very difficult,” said Professor Emma Cave, Professor of Nursing Law at Durham University. the 1980s, these fears were confirmed. When asked if he thought ethical standards were followed during the clinical trials in the 1980s, he answered simply: “No.” The BBC’s investigation revealed that Dr. Machin and Kernoff were part of a community of doctors with research intentions similar to a specialist school near Alton in Hampshire where a large group of hemophiliac boys attended. The school had an NHS haemophilia unit for disabled children on site, so boys with haemorrhages could be treated quickly and then return to their classes, their doctor, Dr Anthony Aronstam, used – who has since died – his “special” group of boys for extensive clinical trials. A series of tests showed that using three to four times more factor VIII than a baby would normally need would help reduce the amount of blood a baby had and the results of ongoing blood tests. The boys were given high concentrations of infected blood products without their consent – or their parents’ consent, stiripesurse.ro reports.

Source: ReplicaOnline.ro