Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

The Chicago Tribune has weighed in with a particularly inane editorial concerning placebo-controlled HIV trials in non-industrialized countries.

Many researchers have protested tests that offer several randomized doses of AZT to pregnant women in very poor countries. Since AZT is known to sometimes protect babies of HIV-positive moms, such protesters rightly note that it is unethical to include a placebo (sugar pill phony) among the "treatments" offered to trial participants. They have likened the protocol to the US's infamous Tuskegee experiments wherein poor black men infected with syphilis in the southern US were intentionally left untreated (and uninformed thereto) in order to study the progression of the lethal disease (a trial that only ended in the 70s... the nineteen-70s).

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The Tribune acknowledges this damning analogy, but ultimately dismisses such concerns, noting that the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health have chosen placebo-controls because the World Health Organization, the countries themselves (wherein the tests are to be done), and the "international medical research community" all think them best and most efficient.

Dawn wonders, instead, what the trial participants (aka, human guinea pigs) think. Would they rather have an agent proven to offer them a chance at a healthy baby, or a sugar pill? The trouble is, guys, such trials are supposed to be responsible first to their participants. Would the heads of the NIH or CDC allow any family members to take a placebo when another treatment was known to be effective? Would the editors at the Tribune?