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Did Government’s Experiment on Preemies Hide Risks?
Just 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Sharrissa Cook gave birth to a critically ill baby boy. Dreshan weighed in at a fragile 1 pound, 11 ounces. He lay motionless in the incubator, connected to tubes and monitors in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.
“He was so tiny,” Cook recalls. “I was a first-time mom. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what to expect.”
It was Oct. 11, 2006. Medical personnel asked Cook, then a 26-year-old single mother, to enroll little Dreshan in a study. She says they described it as a program offering assistance and encouragement to preemies—premature babies—and their families. She readily signed the consent form.
“I remember them telling me they were a support group who would pretty much hold my hand through the developmental process,” Cook says.
But in reality, the study was much more than that. It was a national, government-funded experiment on 1,316 extremely premature infants in which their fate may as well have rested with the flip of a coin.
Other single moms were among those persuaded to sign up their critically ill babies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital describe similar misunderstandings of the study’s purpose.
Bernita Lewis, then a 22-year-old student, says she enrolled her premature newborn, Christian, after medical personnel told her it simply was to gather data such as weight and height.
And Survonda Banks, then 21, unemployed and on public assistance, says someone handed her the consent form on her way in for an emergency C-section at 28 weeks of pregnancy. Banks remembers being told only that it was a way to help her baby, Destiny.
‘Parents Were Misled’
The government-backed study is called SUPPORT, which stands for “Surfactant, Positive Airway Pressure, and Pulse Oximetry Randomized Trial.” The experiment was conducted at 23 academic institutions from 2005 through 2009 under the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/usa-news/governments-experiment-preemies-hide-risks/
