How widespread was experimentation on humans in Apartheid South Africa?
On the bus my son told me what his lecturer at UCL, an expert in his field, had told him. That when the lecturer was working in South Africa, in the late 70s, he came across another medic who was conducting human experiments on poor black South Africans.
When the British Dr., a top nutritionist, asked the white South African Dr. why he was doing such a horrible thing, the response was that: 'Black people are not really human, are they?' The mild mannered nutritionist had to be held back and stopped from punching the South African Dr.
The experiments that the South African Dr. was doing had something with using Krypton, a heavy element, to inhibit the action of a enzyme in digestion.
This causes alarm bells to ring, doesn't it? It makes sense to think that a group of people, the ones who supported the estabishment of Apartheid in 1948, fascist sympathisers during the second world war, might not respect the medical rights of people they regarded as inferior.
But did they conduct human experiments? To what extent did they do this? I am really interested in finding out. Were there Apartheid era Mengeles in South Africa. How many were there? What did they do?
Doing a little searching, it turns out that they were human experimenters and victims of experimentation. The story is revealing. White, suspected lesbian and gay soldiers were forced to have sex change operations against their will in the late seventies in South Africa.
This must be the tip of the ice berg. Were medical experiments carried out in the prisons? Were they carried out in the rural clinics and in the township hospitals? What was the role of the drug companies?
I know it can happen.
I was teaching / managing in a very large private university in Mexico which trained American doctors relatively cheaply. After training these students went back to the US and had to pass some tests in order to get their medical license and then they were then allowed to practice.
The staff of the university had free health care. But they also had to put up with a lot of students witnessing their treatment. So far so good. And then my assistant head of Department told me his story. His wife was pregnant and just before she was about to give birth they administered something to her in the form of a syrup. They wouldn't tell him what it was, but it was 'new' and experimental. His wife nearly died as a result. So did his child.
'If either my wife or my child had died as a result of this experiment' he said, 'I was waiting outside in my car, engine revving and when that doctor who had carried out the experiment on my wife and child came out of the hospital, I was going to run him over. But they survived,' he said.
With this in mind I was a little nervous about sending my wife to receive 'free' treatment at the hospital for a facial spasm she was experiencing. She arrived and within half an hour was 'diagnosed' by the Dr. at university hospital. She was told that she had cysticercosis and that the operation would take place in a week. There was an indecent hurridness about the whole thing.
My wife was nervous. We sought a second opinion from one of my wife's brother's in law, a neurologist / pediatrician / expert in nuclear medicine. He was outraged. How on Earth could this person call himself a Dr? what tests had he done? On what basis did he make his diagnosis? The symptoms simply didn't match.
So then we understood that perhaps the idea was really to offer the American students the spectacle of a brain operation. The staff were getting free medical care, but they were also human meat to the US Dr. money making machine that was the University hospital.
Eventually, Teresa did have her problem solved. A nerve was rubbing against a blood vessel and a top London brain surgeon operated to solve the problem.
But unscrupulous people with dodgy ideologies working in the medical profession will conduct experiments on humans. I am sure that in the epoch of Apartheid large numbers of medical experiments were carried out on what the Apartheid regime regarded as being an inferior race.
Apparently, there were indeed medical experiments carried out and revelations in South Africa in 2001, some of them involving germ warfare projects. Can anyone tell me how widespread it was and what evidence there was of these medical experiments?
Then there are the issues of medical experimentation on poor people by the big drug companies in Africa. The book by John Le Carre, The Constant Gardener, brought this problem to people's attention. What controls on medical experimentation on people in Africa have been imposed on the drug companies since John Le Carre brought the issue to worldwide attention in 2001?
By Phil Hall
On the bus my son told me what his lecturer at UCL, an expert in his field, had told him. That when the lecturer was working in South Africa, in the late 70s, he came across another medic who was conducting human experiments on poor black South Africans.
When the British Dr., a top nutritionist, asked the white South African Dr. why he was doing such a horrible thing, the response was that: 'Black people are not really human, are they?' The mild mannered nutritionist had to be held back and stopped from punching the South African Dr.
The experiments that the South African Dr. was doing had something with using Krypton, a heavy element, to inhibit the action of a enzyme in digestion.
This causes alarm bells to ring, doesn't it? It makes sense to think that a group of people, the ones who supported the estabishment of Apartheid in 1948, fascist sympathisers during the second world war, might not respect the medical rights of people they regarded as inferior.
But did they conduct human experiments? To what extent did they do this? I am really interested in finding out. Were there Apartheid era Mengeles in South Africa. How many were there? What did they do?
Doing a little searching, it turns out that they were human experimenters and victims of experimentation. The story is revealing. White, suspected lesbian and gay soldiers were forced to have sex change operations against their will in the late seventies in South Africa.
This must be the tip of the ice berg. Were medical experiments carried out in the prisons? Were they carried out in the rural clinics and in the township hospitals? What was the role of the drug companies?
I know it can happen.
I was teaching / managing in a very large private university in Mexico which trained American doctors relatively cheaply. After training these students went back to the US and had to pass some tests in order to get their medical license and then they were then allowed to practice.
The staff of the university had free health care. But they also had to put up with a lot of students witnessing their treatment. So far so good. And then my assistant head of Department told me his story. His wife was pregnant and just before she was about to give birth they administered something to her in the form of a syrup. They wouldn't tell him what it was, but it was 'new' and experimental. His wife nearly died as a result. So did his child.
'If either my wife or my child had died as a result of this experiment' he said, 'I was waiting outside in my car, engine revving and when that doctor who had carried out the experiment on my wife and child came out of the hospital, I was going to run him over. But they survived,' he said.
With this in mind I was a little nervous about sending my wife to receive 'free' treatment at the hospital for a facial spasm she was experiencing. She arrived and within half an hour was 'diagnosed' by the Dr. at university hospital. She was told that she had cysticercosis and that the operation would take place in a week. There was an indecent hurridness about the whole thing.
My wife was nervous. We sought a second opinion from one of my wife's brother's in law, a neurologist / pediatrician / expert in nuclear medicine. He was outraged. How on Earth could this person call himself a Dr? what tests had he done? On what basis did he make his diagnosis? The symptoms simply didn't match.
So then we understood that perhaps the idea was really to offer the American students the spectacle of a brain operation. The staff were getting free medical care, but they were also human meat to the US Dr. money making machine that was the University hospital.
Eventually, Teresa did have her problem solved. A nerve was rubbing against a blood vessel and a top London brain surgeon operated to solve the problem.
But unscrupulous people with dodgy ideologies working in the medical profession will conduct experiments on humans. I am sure that in the epoch of Apartheid large numbers of medical experiments were carried out on what the Apartheid regime regarded as being an inferior race.
Apparently, there were indeed medical experiments carried out and revelations in South Africa in 2001, some of them involving germ warfare projects. Can anyone tell me how widespread it was and what evidence there was of these medical experiments?
Then there are the issues of medical experimentation on poor people by the big drug companies in Africa. The book by John Le Carre, The Constant Gardener, brought this problem to people's attention. What controls on medical experimentation on people in Africa have been imposed on the drug companies since John Le Carre brought the issue to worldwide attention in 2001?
By Phil Hall
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