Bayer dumps HIV tainted drug Overseas

[MrScorpio]

http://www.yikers.com/video_bayer_purposely_deployed_medicine_with_hiv_in_it.html

The Wall Street Journal - Wednesday, 7 May 1997.
LEVERKUSEN, Germany (AP) -- Bayer AG said it expects to pay some 460 million marks ($265 million) to the survivors of more than 6,000 AIDS victims in the U.S. infected by tainted blood products between 1978 and 1985.

Bayer spokeswoman Christina Sehnert confirmed Bayer was close to agreement on the AIDS cases, in which three other companies also are involved.

Bayer, Baxter International Inc., Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc. and Alpha Terapeutics Inc. already had reached agreement in April 1996 to settle with some 6,200 U.S. AIDS victims or their survivors for $100,000 each. But the settlements were held up as the U.S. government and several states, including New Jersey, sought reimbursement for medical bills incurred treating hemophiliacs with AIDS.

Ms. Sehnert said that agreements were near on legal costs as well as with the states and federal government on medical costs.

Last year's agreement alone will cost the four companies some $600 million, with Bayer's share close to $270 million. The companies also offered $12 million for medical care of the patients.

http://www.aegis.com/news/wsj/1997/WJ970504.html

[Bluebear]

1. For accuracy's sake, nothing can be tainted with "AIDS" nt

[MrScorpio]

3. Noted and fixed

et

[Hubert Flottz]

8. Something can be tainted with murder and crime though...

And Bayer AG is one of those things...

Alliance for Human Research Protection

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. Elderly Holocaust survivors, former soldiers and world leaders have gathered in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary: "I would like to say to all the people on the Earth: This should never be repeated, ever," said Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, 92, who led the first Soviet troops to enter Auschwitz.

Lest we forget an important corporate participant in the Holocaust - two excerpts shed light on the role of IG Farben, ie. Bayer.

IG Farben was the most powerful German corporate cartel in the first half of the 20th century and the single largest profiteer from the Second World War. IG (Interessengemeinschaft) stands for "Association of Common Interests": IG Farben included BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other German chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

As documents show, IG Farben was intimately involved with the human experimental atrocities committed by Mengele at Auschwitz. MORE...

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/05/01/27a.php

Testimony
by
Vera Hassner Sharav
Committee on the Use of Third Party Toxicity Research with Human Research Participants
Science, Technology, and Law Program
The National Academies of Science

January 8, 2003
My name is Vera Sharav and I am the president and founder of The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP) a citizens' watchdog organization monitoring human research to ensure that the moral principles enshrined in the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki are preserved and followed in experiments involving human beings. The Alliance for Human Research Protection is inalterably opposed to the exploitation of human beings as experimental guinea pigs in nontherapeutic experiments to test poisonous substances.

Pesticide experiments in human beings are morally unconscionable and scientifically dubious - they fail to meet fundamental standards of permissible research - as they offer no potential therapeutic benefit to the subjects or society. Such experiments violate the Nuremberg Code and all subsequent national and international codes of medical research ethics that were adopted precisely to prevent potentially harmful experiments from ever again being conducted on human beings. Thus, it is something of a jolt that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose mission is protecting the public from environmental hazards is even contemplating requests to sanction human pesticide experiments inasmuch as they violate those moral and legal standards.

Pesticides are chemicals designed to kill, control, or repel insects, plant diseases, weeds, rodents, and germs. They are used mostly in agriculture, but also for industrial purposes and to kill pests in homes, schools, and hospitals. Because of their inherent toxicity human exposure to poisonous chemicals is always undesirable. Pesticides have absolutely no therapeutic medical use and human beings exposed to pesticides will never derive a benefit from such exposure. Some of the people exposed can expect to experience adverse effects - often emerging long after exposure. Among the grotesque medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz and other death camps, were experiments that deliberately exposed human beings to germs and poisonous chemicals. When the experiments were publicly revealed during the Nazi "Doctors Trial" at Nuremberg,<1> sixteen doctors were found guilty of "crimes against humanity." The American military tribunal's verdict laid down 10 universal principles - The Nuremberg Code - to set boundaries for permissible (i.e., ethical) research involving human beings. The first qualification for permissible research on human experiments: experiments must "conform to the ethics of the medical profession" and be justified by the expectation that they will "yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study." MORE...

http://www.ahrp.org/testimonypresentations/EPApesticide.php

BAYER AG
A Corporate Profile

By Corporate Watch UK
Completed March 2002

http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=317


The human medical experimentation comparison chart: Nazi Germany vs. present-day Big Pharma


Historians usually refer to Nazi Germany's IG Farben as the epitome of bad medicine, where horrifying medical experiments were routinely carried out on innocent civilians. Most people accept the history of IG Farben as true, yet those same people are reluctant to admit that today's modern pharmaceutical industry is not only directly descended from IG Farben, it still follows many of the same inhumane practices.

In this comparison chart, we take a closer look at the similarities between the medical experimentation carried out in Nazi Germany vs. the practices of Big Pharma in the United States today. The times have changed, and medical experimentation has a prettier face, but it's still the same horrifying practice of exploiting the most vulnerable citizens in society to outright criminal experiments with pharmaceuticals. MORE...

http://www.newstarget.com/019190.html


Do a google search on 'Bayer IG Farben Medical Experiments' and you will find much more information. Old "Trusted" Bayer has taken care of some people's headaches, who never lived to tell the story...

[MazeRat7]

2. Hummm.. they screwed up, they have to pay... this is a bad thing how?

Granted, the settlement "seems" a little light, but this was the late 70's early 80's before anyone really understood the pathology of HIV.

MZr7

[Hekate]

7. Actually, medical companies and boards of health knew pretty well

The US government was criminally slow to respond, which was bad enough. (See the book "And the Band Played On" about the Reagan administration's head in the sand attitude.)

But the state boards of public health in both France and Japan knowingly allowed contaminated blood supplies to remain on the market, directly causing the deaths of many blood transfusion recipients, most especially hemopheliacs. Big scandals when the news broke. Not sure if some French went to prison, but I think at least one Japanese committed suicide in apology.

Hekate

[dddem]

9. You're correct

The Government knew, and would not issue a recall, only a "recommendation". The companies involved made a financial decision to allow the tainted blood product to stay on the market, as it was more cost effective to settle with potential victims rather than heat-treat the product (which would have killed the virus). A dear friend lost her son 10 year ago to AIDS due to using this 'life-saving' clotting factor. He was not merely a victim, he was a 9 year old boy when he became infected with HIV, and he was 21 when he died. He was one of the sweetest kids I ever knew, and his mother misses him terribly. Many of the victims are still alive, but can't work, because they can't get insurance. If they accept a settlement of 100k, they will lose their benefits, and the money will be gone for meds within a couple of years.
I asked my friend if she felt as though her son had been murdered, and she said she did. Had the families known about the tainted product, they could have used other options, but they didn't know.
What a shame.

[Hekate]

10. For something that was allegedly a "gay disease" it sure killed alot of...

... hemopheliacs. I'm so sorry for your friend's grievous loss.

And yes, I think selling tainted blood supply amounts to murder -- corporate murder, which as we all know is seldom punished with the severity it deserves. Like the decision to keep the Pinto's gas tank where it was, the corporations did a cost-benefit analysis and concluded they could pay off victims' families more cheaply than correcting the problem and saving lives.

Times like this I hope there IS a Hell. Or at least karmic retribution that sends certain people back as cockroaches.

Hekate

[The_Warmth]

4. How does...

HIV end up in a bunch of meds?

[MrScorpio]

5. Some drugs are made from blood and blood plasma

Obviously, these tainted drugs were made before the stringent testing that occurs today

[The_Warmth]

6. Thanks

for the reply!