http://www.boston.com/dailynews/235/nation/Government_opens_investigation:.shtml

Government opens investigation into lead-paint children's study at heart of lawsuits

By Associated Press, 8/23/2001 15:01

BALTIMORE (AP) The government is investigating a lead-paint study of poor city children that a judge has likened to Nazi research on concentration camp prisoners.

The probe is being conducted by the Health and Human Services Department's Office for Human Research, which briefly shut down human research at Johns Hopkins University this year following the death of an asthma study volunteer.

Investigators are looking into a federally funded study by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which is also affiliated with Johns Hopkins, that examined inexpensive alternatives for removing lead paint.

Landlords were paid to recruit about 100 families with healthy children to live in their homes during the early 1990s. Children who can develop brain damage if they eat lead paint chips were to be tested periodically to see how well the abatement methods worked.

Lawsuits have been filed on behalf of two children who allegedly suffered elevated blood-lead levels and irreversible brain damage in the study. The suits seek unspecified damages from the landlords and Kennedy Krieger, a children's hospital and research center.

Last week, state Judge Dale R. Cathell allowed the lawsuits to proceed and criticized the university's Institutional Review Board for protecting the interests of researchers at the expense of the children.

The judge said the research project contained problems similar to those in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was conducted on uneducated black men in Alabama from the 1930s to 1970s. Cathell also drew comparisons to typhus experiments conducted on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II.

Kennedy Krieger chief executive Gary Goldstein has said the children ran a high risk of lead paint exposure because they already lived in older houses.

In the asthma study case, federal regulators found that researchers had bypassed several safety checkpoints.

-- Anonymous, August 23, 2001

Answers

Good heavens, that's an outrage! How on earth did they get away with it? So many people must have been involved.

-- Anonymous, August 23, 2001