The book also started me wondering and questioning a few things concerning human experiments so I did an internet search to verify the Author's notes. What I found scares the shit out of me.
One of my greatest fears concerning the War on Terrorism has been the thought of how easy it would be for a silent attack with biological, or chemical, weapons. All it would take to infect a great many people would be for a lone person to climb a water tower in the dead of night with bolt cutters and a pack full of some nasty chemical or other poison and dump it in. I know for a fact that these tanks are not inspected on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, so contamination would hardly be detected until actual casualties occurred. Maybe not even then.
Anyway, after reading this book and surfing a little, I found that a Terrorist attack isn't our only concern.
"Beginning in the 1930s, 399 men signed up with the U.S. Public Health Service for free medical care. The service was conducting a study on the effects of syphilis on the human body. The men were never told they had syphilis. They were told they had "bad blood" and were denied access to treatment, even for years after penicillin came into use in 1947. By the time the study was exposed in 1972, 28 men had died of syphilis, 100 others were dead of related complications, at least 40 wives had been infected and 19 children had contracted the disease at birth." The name given to this study was The Tuskegee (AL) Syphilis Study.
In 1935 there was The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occurred within poverty-stricken black populations.
The list of incidences continues through the pre and post-war years. You can see for yourself here.
While I'm freaking out over the actions or our cold, calculating doctors, scientists, and government officials from the past I continue reading and find that not much has changed. These same people still don't really give a shit in the name of National Defense and Research.
In 1990 more than 1500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
In 1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.
In 1996 Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were exposed to chemical agents. (ours?)
Executive Order 13139 is requiring military personnel to receive experimental vaccines not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Courts-martial are pending.
A day after Republican Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut ended congressional hearings on the controversial decision mandating the inoculation of 2.4 million U.S. troops against anthrax, President Clinton quietly signed an executive order, or EO, that denies soldiers the right to refuse experimental vaccines.
I visited several sites to read more about some of the individual studies but found one in particular that gives a history of the experimental studies using human subjects with and without their knowledge.
Go on, read it for yourself.
Are we stupid or what?
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ON TO A LIGHTER SUBJECT,,,,,,,,,,,
This was taken by a helicopter flying over Cross Lake! (For those of you who are not local, Cross Lake is in Shreveport, La.)
That has to be a HUGE gator to have a whole deer in its mouth!
Are you ready to go skiing on Cross Lake?! If you ski at the west end of the lake -- try not to fall.
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