Monday, December 18, 2017

Consistent in their Death Probes.


There are a couple of things among other consistencies in white American thought and practice that stand out: the experimentation on Black Americans and an insistence upon killing. There are no studies on this. There are no scientific studies on this kind of purpose and inclinations because the science worlds are governed by the very people who need the most psychological work done. . . - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 12/18/17






"Perhaps Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) best exemplified the dubious protections of parental consent, which it was careful to elicit when it began its "Repair and Maintenance Study" in the mid-1990s. Researchers approached black families in 108 units of decrepit housing encrusted with crumbling, peeling lead paint... we know how to protect children by banning the use of lead paint and by offering lead-abatement programs. But the agenda of the KKI scientists did not include removing children from lead exposure, because they planned to use these children to evaluate new, cheaper lead-abatement techniques -of unknown efficacy- in old homes with peeling paint.

...they purposely arranged with landlords to have children inhabit lead-tainted housing so they could monitor changes in the children's lead levels as well as the brain and developmental damage that resulted from the different kinds of lead- abatement programs. Scientists offered parents of children in these lead-laden homes incentives such as fifteen-dollar payments to cooperate with the study, without divulging it placed their children at risk of lead exposure...

When the KKI drew blood from one-year-old Erika Grimes on April 9, 1993, for example, her reading was nine micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL), which is a "normal" reading, according to CDC guidelines. The KKI identified lead-imbued hotspots in the home but did not tell Erika's parents. When Erika was retested on September 15, 1994, her blood-lead reading was 32 μg/dL, which CDC charts label a "highly elevated" reading.

The KKI is affiliated with the prestigious John Hopkins University, whose IRB approved the protocol. On August 16, 2001, Maryland's top appellate court ruled against the researchers, drawing a parallel to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment."
~ Harriet A. Washington / Medical Apartheid (The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present) pp 291 & 292



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