Wednesday 13 October 2010

'First, do no harm'.

There's a long post building, but putting it into words is difficult. In the meantime, I am not sure what to make of the vanishing Malaria man.

O'Blimey has recently apologised for the US doctors experimenting on mental patients in Guatemala, years back. They deliberately infected those patients with sexually transmitted diseases to test penicillin. The controls were not treated, in line with scientific practice but far outside the bounds of ethics and general human decency.

Then there was another experiment where infected black Americans were monitored but not treated, so that the medics could watch the disease in progress. Hippocrates surely cannot believe his ghostly eyes.

All that is in the past, in the dark days before ethics committees and health and safety executives.

Yet today there is a man who has been deliberately infected with malaria as part of an experiment. Not in the past. Today. He's a nurse, so the scares of him dying without treatment aren't real. He knows what to get and where to get it. In fact, what he needs is a damn good gin and tonic. If you read this, Malaria man, they are tracking you by your bank and credit cards. Take out a large wad of cash and change direction after buying a train ticket with your cards, in the wrong direction. Then get a bus - pay cash - in another direction.

Why is he running and hiding? If his participation was voluntary, why not just go back to the experiment? What is he running from?

He is not some terrorist trying to spread the disease. Malaria doesn't spread that way. No, he's hiding and people who are hiding are people who are scared.

In this day and age, it is surely not possible to consider even the remotest idea that doctors could even think about performing disease experiments on the unsuspecting. It is unbelievable, real tin-hat territory, to even dream the merest thought of the slightest possibility that Mengele's approach to science lives on.

Have you noticed how many previously-unknown diseases are appearing in hospitals these days? Ones that could be quickly and simply eradicated, but the NHS trusts don't seem interested in solutions?

Coincidence. Of course it is. It's far more comfortable to believe that. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

I mean, it's not as if they regard us as farm animals, is it?

16 comments:

subrosa said...

Very strange business LI. Will we ever know the whole story?

JuliaM said...

Is it coincidence that the UK winner of the Eurolotto hasn't yet come forward either?

Longrider said...

That story had me scratching my head, too. And the idea that people will be deliberately infected with a disease in order to carry out tests horrified me.

Something smells about this story. Like Subrosa, I wonder if we will ever know.

Frank Davis said...

In the Mail it says: doctors warned he will die within 24 hours if he does not seek urgent medical attention.

Perhaps it's a virulent new strain of malaria that they're developing - because malaria doesn't usually kill within 24 hours. Plenty of people survive it. Or used to.

Anonymous said...

Suicide by clinical trial?

OT but bound to raise your piss to boiling point, LI - you do know you're now responsible for Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption/whatever bollocks they're calling it this week?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/12/climate-craziness-of-the-week-2/#more-26311

V4V said...

When I was in the Forces they were always after people for these so called medical trials, you were told it was for the common cold or flu and of course you got some time off as well as some extra sheckels.

Anonymous said...

None of this makes any apparent sense. There is obviously an undisclosed subtext associated with this one.

Would make a good intro situation for an episode of "Fringe"

Awaiting further information.

Expat Brit living in Canada

Pogo said...

I see that the "Fail"'s journalists are as medically-savvy as they are other-science-savvy. Apparently, the poor bloke has been "injected with the deadly virus"... Last time I looked, malaria was a parasite - fortunately it's not really the mosquito season in the UK at the moment! :-)

Anonymous said...

Malaria man is an odd one, isn’t he? There are some strange statements in the article, too – “doctors warned he will die within 24 hours if he does not seek urgent medical attention” (my emphasis). 24 hours??? What, exactly, have they injected him with? Because, serious though Malaria is, I don’t think there’s a single strain in existence which kills people so definitely and so quickly. It also says that he had “phoned in ill to work in the days immediately prior to Thursday's appointment.” Which begs the question – if this is such a deadly strain of the disease what were the researchers thinking of, sending him back to work – especially in (presumably) a hospital? OK, so in our largely mosquito-free country Malaria may not be infectious but if whatever he’s been injected with is so darned deadly why didn’t they want him (and all the volunteers, for that matter) kept safely in isolation in their research labs rather than out and about in the community at large, just in case?

And why all the hoo-ha? People are reported missing almost all the time to the police and although they’ll make some initial attempts to find them in the first instance, unless it’s a child, a criminal, or some kind of foul play is likely (such as a pool of blood on the living room floor), they’ll usually give up pretty quickly and just log the individual onto the “missing persons” file. Of course they’re concerned about this bloke, because he’s got Malaria (or something), but as Malaria isn’t usually infectious without the aid of mosquitoes, it isn’t as if he’s likely to spread it around – unless, of course, this strain is different ……………..

Leg-iron said...

JuliaM - that's a horrible thought. Earning a crust by submitting to medical experiments, then winning the lottery the day after being injected with something deadly.

A real 'Tale of the Unexpected'.

Leg-iron said...

Pogo - that happens all the time. I still grind my teeth at 'Salmonella virus' and 0(zero)157. It's an antigen and antigens are identified by a letter.

No point trying to educate them. We know what they think of bloggers.

Leg-iron said...

This is a curious case indeed.

He's infected with something but malaria wouldn't be anywhere near as deadly as they claim.

Considering the years of hoops we are jumping through to get ethical approval to feed a fruit drink to patients which we know will cure C. difficile, how in hell did anyone get ethical clearance to inject someone with something nasty?

Tinfoil hats ready? Here we go.

Q: If you wanted to get another disease into hospitals to add to the collection they already don't want to cure, how would you do it? Infecting a patient is no good, they tend to stay in one place. You need to infect someone who has the run of the place.

A: Infect a nurse and send him back to work. he not only has access to most of the hospital, he's obliged to go all over the place.

The only problem would be if the nurse found out what the plan was a did a runner. Then you risk infecting the wrong people, and you can't control the experiment.

Pure speculation, of course, but it would make a damn good novel. Almost as good as that Orwell chap's work of pure fiction.

I mean, it's not as if any of that came true.

tomsmith said...

Why would anyone want to get another disease into hospitals?

Anonymous said...

Tomsmith,
Just some possible reasons:

1. To kill off old, sick and weedy people when they are at their most vulnerable. Has the advantage of being explain-able as another “hospital superbug” or, better still, could be passed off as being killed by their original illness. Will save loads of money!

2. To create a really big “health scare” to bolster the fear levels which have been dropping lately because no-one believes them any more.

3. So that big pharmaceutical companies can make big dollars by “discovering” a vaccine/cure for the “new” illness.

4. (For the real conspiracy theorists out there), to do away with large swathes of the population quickly and easily, without any need for machine guns or gas chambers.

There are probably plenty of others, but I can’t think of any this late at night!

Leg-iron said...

Why?

Why did Mengele do the terrible things he did?

Because he thought he was advancing science and science is more important than those it claims to help.

It's a common theme and it is far from dead.

We are experimental animals to the twisted mind, and the twisted get the grants.

tomsmith said...

Apparently they found him, in the Netherlands

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