Milkhouse Mouse

Last Tuesday (15 April), Australia's Daily Telegraph excavated some barbaric racism endured by that country's indigenous children through "Australian state policy between about 1880 and 1960, but... concentrated around the 1930s."

ABORIGINAL children were injected with leprosy treatments in a medical testing program that used members of the Stolen Generation as guinea pigs, a Senate Committee has heard.

Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was "shocked and alarmed" by the claims, heard today by the Senate legal and constitutional committee's inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008.

On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.

And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.

"These are the things that have not been spoken about," Ms Mills told the inquiry.

"As well as being taken away, they were used ... there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about."

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.

She said he told her that children were used as "guinea pigs" for leprosy treatments....

Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the Government to assist "opening Pandora's box".

In 1932, the US Public Health Service initiated a similar "medical apartheid" program among 600 poor, illiterate black males partitioned into two study groups-- "399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease"-- at Alabama's all-Black Tuskegee Institute.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) that attributes altruistic motives to the secret ethnic health study, "Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years"--until a San Francisco doctor finally blew the whistle in 1972.

US Ethnic Cleansing: 'Bama "Bad Blood" & Hitler's Final Solution

A May 1996 University of Virginia medical report, however, more objectively delineated the study's racist implications for health care policies among American minorities.

From 1932 to 1972, 399 poor black sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by physicians of the United States Public Health Service. As part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, designed to document the natural history of the disease, these men were told that they were being treated for “bad blood.”In fact, government officials went to extreme lengths to insure that they received no therapy from any source. As reported by the New York Times on 26 July 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was revealed as “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”

The Study continues to cast a long shadow over the relationship between African Americans and the biomedical professions; it is argued that the Study is a significant factor in the low participation of African Americans in clinical trials, organ donation efforts, and routine preventive care.

Until the study ended, the costs that withheld medical treatment for the men had had on their wives and children were not assessed.

By 1975, 50 wives of participants had been tested for syphilis; 27 were found to be positive. Although the exact source of their infection cannot be ascertained, they may have contracted it as a direct result of the denial of treatment to their husbands. The federal government has acknowledged this possibility and since 1975, has provided lifetime medical benefits to 22 wives, 17 children, and two grandchildren who have syphilis (New York Times. May 12, 1997:A1).

The now-infamous Tuskegee Experiment was theoretically based in a body of concepts called eugenics (from the Greek, literally "well born") that originated in 1863 with Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's math-savant cousin. After startling revision, this line of thinking soon resonated among America's wealthiest white families concerned by the turn of the 20th century with socially and genetically deleterious effects from upheaveals linked to nonwhite immigrants. In American minds,

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a [blonde haired, blue-eyed] Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states....

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

...[The Nordic ideal] alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

While families such as the Carnegies and Harrimans eagerly funded eugenics-based US social activism, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that actually "helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz" to implement Hitler's "Final Solution" for ridding Europe of "parasitic" Jews.

In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state [California]," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

After World War II, prominent scientists serving the Nazi cause were secretly brought into the US, rather than face prosecution for war crimes in newly liberated Germany. The US government's "Operation Paperclip"

was a postwar and Cold War operation carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). Operation Paperclip’s code name was said to have originated because scientific recruits’ papers were paperclipped with regular immigration forms.

The JIOA was a special intelligence office reporting to the Director of Intelligence in the War Department, comparable to the intelligence chief of today’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Paperclip had two aims:

1) to exploit German scientists for American research;
2) to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union.

At least 1600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s.

In recent years, it has been alleged that many of these individuals were brought to the United States in violation of American government policy not to permit the entrance of "ardent Nazis" into the country, that many were security risks, and that at least some were implicated in Holocaust-related activities.

In some cases, the Nazi scientists who illegally entered the US via Paperclip even reproduced their human experimentation studies for US government agencies, to include radiation experimentation on poor, dependent American children.

The government’s human radiation committee looked at 21 cases of experimentation on children involving over 800 subjects, a number they themselves admit I just small proportion of what went on. One of the cases they concentrated on was dietary research conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the staff of Walter E. Fernald School. A residential institute for boys.

Former residents, some of whom ended up there simply because their families didn’t want them any more, describe the school as being dirty and brutal. In 1946, researchers set up a ‘science club’ at the school, enticing boys to join with such perks as a quart of milk a day and the occasional chance to leave the building.

In return, the boys were to eat a special ‘rich’ diet breakfast food ‘enriched’ with radioactive iron and to submit to regular blood tests. Letters to the boys’ parents implied that the testing would improve their health. The research, along with a later experiment at the school involving calcium, was funded by the National Institute of Health, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oaks Company [uuummmmm]

The government report ends its section on ‘non-therapeutic’ tests on children with:"Today, fifty years after the Fernald experiments, there are still no federal regulations protecting institutionalized children from unfair treatment in research involving human subjects.”

One ex-Fernald boy, Charlie Dyer, who has fathered two daughters with severe birth defects, said recently: “Get to the truth fast before the government hides everything and you can’t find nothing out. Because that’s what the government does, putting it in boxes and crates and hiding everything from the public.”