Wilson died in prison in 2007. His lawyers had at least convinced him to let them disclose what they knew after his death, and armed with decades-old affidavits, the pair had Logan freed in 2008. By that point, he had already served almost half his life in prison, so something tells us he didn’t send them a thank-you note.
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Medical Researchers Sometimes Deny People Lifesaving Treatment In The Name of Science
1
Medical Researchers Sometimes Deny People Lifesaving Treatment In The Name of Science
With any new drug, there’s a testing phase that usually consists of clinical trials, wherein one group is given the real medication while another is given a placebo that does nothing. Now, here’s where things get complicated: Western standards of care prohibit anything but the approved treatment for HIV-positive pregnant women, even in the context of a clinical trial. So U.S. researchers instead take their trials to places like Malawi, reasoning that many women there wouldn’t receive any treatment otherwise, and we kind of have to do trials to figure out if these drugs work on pregnant women.
But it doesn’t feel entirely moral to deny effective, established treatments to such vulnerable populations, especially when we refuse to deny those treatments to more, uh …. “Western” patients. But then again, there might be an even more effective treatment out there, and we have no way of finding out besides putting those extremely vulnerable people at risk in the first place.
aryfahmed/Adobe StockThis positive involves a lot of negatives.
To further complicate matters, Malawi has made some giant leaps in providing care to HIV-positive pregnant women in the last decade. In 2011, the nation’s Ministry of Health formally mandated approved treatment for every HIV-positive pregnant woman, resulting in a 748 percent increase in Malawian women receiving treatment. So by participating in “cutting-edge” U.S. studies, Malawian women might receive inferior treatment when compared with the state-sponsored care now available to them. This is but another chapter in the long history of friction between medical science and brown people — one that illustrates that while the person in the white coat might have the best interests of humanity at heart, that doesn’t necessarily mean yours specifically.
Justin Krez is a vagrant who is alternatively writing or day-drinking in a P.F. Chang’s. You can’t find him on Twitter, but you might find him meditating in a cardboard box. Michael Battaglino is a new contributor to Cracked.com. Be sure to check out some of his other work if you enjoyed this article. A.P. Anderson is a freelance editor and comedy writer from Athens, GA. He once sold a potato to Michael Stipe. Find him on Twitter: @Breezus_H
That last one there was like a much more complicated version of Dallas Buyers Club.
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