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View Full Version : Haryana population from being biological warfare scapegoat...



urmiladuhan
November 23rd, 2002, 02:21 AM
SHOULD SAY :HARYANA POPULATION SAVED FROM...SORRY FOR THE TYPING ERROR IN SUBJECT THE MODIFY OPTION WOULD NOT LET ME CHANGE THE SUBJECT TITLE.







hello members,















i came across an interesting editorial article in 15th november's Indian Reporter newspaper (available in major U.S cities) whose gist i would like to share.















Under public health program to control malaria, U.S sponsered a project in sonipat (haryana) which involved massive release of Ades aegypti mosquitoes to study how these yello fever transmitting mosquitoes found their way in homes and other places after their release from the center of the town.















U.S has recently made public some documents on its biological warfare trials. The report mentions that in one such experimental trial the same mosquito that transmits yellow fever and dengue fever (Ades aegypti) were released in Baker Island (Pacific Ocean) to get information similar to what their project aimed at in Sonipat in 1975. Both the projects had identical aims but were under different banners. Yellow fever does not exist in India but dengue does!. Now the good news is that Indira Gandhi ordered a closedown on this undercover biological warfare trials before the release of mosquitoes although hundreds and thousands of mosquitoes were reared at a special facility in New Delhi. The news came as a surprise to me. I wonder if common people in Sonipat were aware of their participation as test subjects.































For a free copy of the newspaper, interested members may want to contact: editor@indianreporter.com

singhkapoor
November 23rd, 2002, 06:35 AM
Urmila ji

The news came as a shock to me. More so 'cuz... at that time I must have been a 7 yr old growing up in a village 5 km from Sonipat.

It is appalling to know that I was probably one of the thousands of guinea pigs in that experiment.

Anyone wants to be my attorney for a muti-million lawsuit?????? hahahahaha

kapoor singh

chashokverma
November 23rd, 2002, 10:54 AM
shocking

but why the Sonipat was selected? it is not a malaria infested area as is the case with eastern UP or Bihar or Assam.

May be the Jats were the target of the experiments. The govt of India ows an explanation to her people. Plz obtain a copy of this article and post it your MPs to raise the issue in The parliament.

shokeen123
November 23rd, 2002, 10:36 PM
According to “The Nuremberg Code,” the voluntary consent of the human subject in research is absolutely essential. As a publc health profesional I was aware of the Nuremberg Trial, Tuskegee study, Love Canal, Agent Orange, and the Swine Flu vaccine, but this latest revelation comes as a total shock!

What happened in Sonepat in 1975 was indeed brutal attack on innocence, and we will never know how the participants were chosen, and what happened to them, because:

They may not have been educated enough to give “informed consent”
Compensation for their time and participation, may have tempted and misled them;
Approval by greedy local officials may never be proved.
Study (record) details may already have been tempered with!

But the history is filled with such examples. Fifty years ago, the Nuremberg Code, created in response to the atrocities of Nazi medicine, called for the informed consent of participants in human research. That same year, penicillin was recognized as the standard of care for syphilis.

Researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service failed to connect these two milestones. They continued to conduct a long-running study in Tuskegee, Alabama, on the course of syphilis in untreated African-American men and chose not to provide penicillin to study participants. Today, some researchers attribute problems in recruiting African Americans for clinical trials, at least in part, to the Tuskegee study.

Nuremberg Trial

On 19 August 1947, the Tribunal for the Doctors' Trial, conducted in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg in the American Occupation Zone of Germany, concluded that 23 Nazi medical doctors had committed atrocities in their conduct of concentration camp experiments involving Jews, Russians, and others. Seven of the defendants were executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The judgment at, conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military, contains a 10-point statement on medical ethics, called the Nuremberg Code. Among other things, the code called for patient consent in experiments and avoidance of the physical and mental suffering of participants.

Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment:

At the same time, nearly 5000 miles away in impoverished Macon County, Alabama, 399 African-American men with untreated syphilis were being studied to determine the natural history of the venereal disease. The study began in 1932, years before the adoption of the Nuremberg Code. The fact that therapy was withheld from the men was not made public until a journalist exposed the experiment in 1972. In fact, James Jones, PhD, a University of Houston historian and author of Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Free Press, 1993), wrote that as awareness of the benefits of penicillin grew, the researchers saw greater urgency in continuing "a never-again-to-be-repeated opportunity."

Love Canal:

Love Canal is a neighbourhood in Niagara Falls, New York. The nickname "Love Canal" came from the last name of William Love who in 1896 began digging a canal connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie (bypassing Niagara Falls) in order to serve as a water power conduit. It was never completed but the Hooker Chemical Company, located west of the canal, had the ingenious idea of turning the uncompleted canal into a dumping ground for the chemical by-products of its manufacturing process.

Once the canal was filled with waste, the land was covered over and sold to the Niagara Falls city school board for $1.00 and a school and subdivision of homes was built right on top of the waste.

The chemicals were detected leaking out of the site in 1977 and many health problems were also reported. Residents were evacuated after a lengthy fight with the New York State government. Today, it remains a ghost town. The main dump site is fenced in (with a school and many homes bulldozed over and buried in the ground with the waste). Over the rest of the area of crumbling, dilapidated homes hangs a gaunt, eerie silence, reminding visitors of the spectre that hazardous waste poses in our modern society.

Agent Orange:

Agent Orange was the code name for a herbicide developed for the military, primarily for use in tropical climates. Although the genesis of the product goes back to the 1940's, serious testing for military applications did not begin until the early 1960's.

The purpose of the product was to deny an enemy cover and concealment in dense terrain by defoliating trees and shrubbery where the enmy could hide. The product "Agent Orange" (a code name for the orange band that was used to mark the drums it was stored in, was principally effective against broad-leaf foliage, such as the dense jungle-like terrain found in Southeast Asia.

The product was tested in Vietnam in the early 1960's, and brought into ever widening use during the height of the war 1967-1968, though it's use was diminished and eventually discontinued in 1971.

Agent Orange was a 50-50 mix of two chemicals, known conventionally as 2,4,D and 2,4,5,T. The combined product was mixed with kerosene or diesel fuel and dispersed by aircraft, vehicle, and hand spraying. An estimated 19 million gallons of Agent Orange were used in South Vietnam during the war.

The earliest health concerns about Agent Orange were about the product's contamination with TCDD, or dioxin. TCDD is one of a family of dioxins, some found in nature, and are cousins of the dibenzofurans and pcb's.

The TCDD found in Agent Orange is thought to be harmful to man. In laboratory tests on animals, TCDD has caused a wide variety of diseases, many of them fatal. TCDD is not found in nature, but rather is a man-made and always unwanted byproduct of the chemical manufacturing process. The Agent Orange used in Vietnam was later found to be extremely contaminated with TCDD.

The bottom line here is, "might is right!" The mankind is doomed to suffer consequences of junk science, sometimes paying heavy price. It is continuing to this day, names may have changed, e.g., Anthrax, Saran Gas...but the intent is same! Only education about ill efffects of such chemicals can prevent such disasters.

singhkapoor
November 24th, 2002, 06:28 PM
Sujata Bahan Ji

It was indeed a very informative article/reply.

Yea, it is a shame that the so called powers of the world are still not ready to learn from history which is replete with such horrifying "man-managed" disasters.

kapoor singh