Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Pharma watch

Forwarded from Before It's News:

Recently, Bayer Pharmaceuticals has come under a lot of scrutiny, due to some of their recent problems with some of their products that were mass produced, and sold to millions of consumers. Products in question include but, are not limited to these examples would be, Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella, Minera etc.
With that being said this is not the first time that Bayer has been under such scrutiny. Bayer A/K/A IG Farben use experimental drugs were tested on Auschwitz & Mauthausen-Gusen prisoners. Auschwitz & Mauthausen-Gusen were two of many concentration camps throughout Germany. Bayer along with several other smaller chemical companies in Germany were the biggest single financier of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1944.
 
I.G. Farben attempted to shake its abominable image through corporate restructuring and renaming the company Bayer after World War II. Which proved to be pure genius, because most people don’t know Bayer was/is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in written history. The fact that Bayer is now under fire for negligence due to not warning its consumers of all possible side effects of drugs and products they have produced, shows that like tigers Bayer has not changed it’s stripes.
The drugs Yaz, Yasmin, & Ocella are all pretty much the same drug with different names as a way to increase profits. When Yasmin and it’s counterparts were released in 2001, Bayer did not tell the users of these product that it could possibly cause, blood clots, gallbladder disease, deep vein embolism, heart attack, pulmonary embolism or stroke. Which in essence means that Bayer is still doing human experiments.
 
We can also use the drug Thalidomide for example. Thalidomide was first released in the US in the late 1950′s, as a drug prescribed to pregnant mothers to help aid them with morning sickness. It was considered perfectly safe and had even received FDA approval. As a result of taking Thalidomide while pregnant several women gave birth to babies who were born without arms or legs. It was later removed from the market in 1961. Thalidomide was a drug developed by wartime Nazis from one of their many chemical weapons experiments used on Jews. Would you believe that the FDA has once again approved the use of Thalidomide?! It is a drug used to help treat chemotherapy patients with cancer. It is also still considered safe. 
 
While this article is mainly about the history of Bayer, I would also like to discuss big pharmaceuticals companies in the US as a whole. While Bayer has many skeletons in its closet they are not alone in human experimenting in the US. Below I have cited just a few of the experiments that the US has done on its citizens over the years.
 
There was experimental drug testing centers in the US. New York City children’s homes (during the late 1980s and 1990s) & For the EPA’s proposed CHEERS study: Health care centers in Duvall County, Fla.
 
Experimental drug test subjects were mainly poor people — including children in poor families, orphans and foster care children; immigrants; mentally ill and mentally challenged individuals and prisoners.
 
For CHEERS: Children born to low-income, minority families
 
Potential test subjects were given long forms written in language they may not understand (either because they are immigrants or because it’s written in obscure technical jargon) as “informed consent”

In the New York City children’s homes: Forced non-compliant children to take experimental AIDS drugs by feeding them medication through tubes placed in their stomachs
 
In 1986, New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).
 
In 1906 Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (GregerSharav).
In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research published data used from injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis.

In 1913, At St. Vincent’s House childrens’ home in Philadelphia 15 children were injected with tuberculin that caused permanent blindness in some of the children. This test was reported and recorded but none of the researchers were punished.
 
In 1915, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans.
 
In 1948, Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons
 
In 1985, A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent

In 1987, Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son’s brain post-mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of “implied consent,” meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied
 
 
In 1990, The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War (“Desert Storm”). More than 400,000 of these soldiers were ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome — symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems — affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).
 
Also, in 1990, The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an “experimental” measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).
The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield

In 1992, Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males — mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents — 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys ‘R’ Us gift certificate
 
In 1993, Researchers at the West Haven VA in Connecticut give 27 schizophrenics — 12 inpatients and 15 functioning volunteers — a chemical called MCPP that significantly increases their psychotic symptoms and, as researchers note, negatively affects the test subjects on a long-term basis

The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons

In 2002, The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate — a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses — every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water

In 2002, President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects.
Being forewarned, is being forearmed. Despite popular belief ignorance is not bliss.

No comments:

Post a Comment