Victims of sinister medical procedures included residents of Staten Island's infamous Willowbrook State School Published: Tuesday, March 01, 2011, 12:48 AM
By Associated Press
ATLANTA — Incredible as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to patients at Staten Island’s former Willowbrook State School, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a Brooklyn hospital. Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.
In this undated file photo, a developmentally disabled resident counts and packages screws at the former Willowbrook State School.
U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick. Such was the case at the Willowbrook, now home to the College of Staten Island, where patients were forcefed milkshakes laced with a live hepatits virus as part of state-sanctioned experiments from 1963 to 1966. They were also given injections to see if they could be cured with gamma globulin.
Page 109 of 179