IPA NY Voices That Must Be Heard



IPA-NY MISSION: IPA-NY, a sponsored project of the Independent Press Association (IPA), provides assistance to New York's ethnic and community press.

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Activists protest medical experiments on adopted Latino children by city agency

By Maruxa Relaño, Hoy, 27 March 2005. Translated from Spanish by Chris Brandt.

A small group of activists demonstrated yesterday in front of a Washington Heights home for HIV-positive adopted children, demanding it be closed because of its controversial pharmaceutical trials. The home, Incarnation Children’s Center, has been in the eye of the hurricane for months, since reports revealed that it had carried out pharmaceutical trials on children who lived at the Center.

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) said the experiments ended in 2002 and were meant to provide indispensable treatment for children living at the home.

But the protesters, from several community organizations, are not satisfied with these explanations.

“The federal government has been investigating this for a year. Why have they not publish any results?” said Vera Sharav. Her organization, Alliance for Human Research Protection, has gained access to an ACS internal memorandum that gave the green light to experiments with medications on whole groups of children, according to Sharav.

“Federal regulations say that a parent or guardian must approve the trial one child at a time. This is treating them like cattle.”

For Rolando Bini, director of Parents in Action, this is a question of racial discrimination. “If they did this with dogs and cats, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would shut the center down immediately,” he said. According to Bini, the experiments are continuing, and the children are taken every week to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital to be examined.

In New York, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a dozen hospitals are recruiting children to participate in trials of experimental anti-AIDS drugs. According to the NIH website, the Incarnation Children’s Center, which is included in the list of hospitals, has its “recruitment closed.”

Guthrie Birhead, director of the AIDS Institute of the New York State Department of Health, wrote in a letter to Commissioner Antonia Novello that before any child received treatment, the protocol had been approved by the National Institutes of Health, the center itself, and the ACS, “according to strict criteria.”

“New York State provides the best AIDS treatment in the United States for children with AIDS and should be recognized for its efforts to help these children,” the letter concludes.

This article appeared in Edition 163 of Voices That Must Be Heard.

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