THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 21, 1994 TAG: 9406210546
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: 940621 LENGTH: RICHMOND
An article in Sunday's Washington Post's commentary and opinion section by researcher Cliff Honicker said doctors ``conducted a series of potentially dangerous experiments on hundreds of unaware human subjects, most of them poor and African American.''
{REST} Honicker, director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project of the Commission on Religion in the Appalachia, also charged that one of the Army-sponsored studies during the 1940s and 1950s was carried out in a secret laboratory at MCV.
``That's baloney,'' said Dr. William T. Ham, retired head of biophysics at MCV.
Ham, 85, produced newspaper clippings from The Richmond News Leader about one of the experiments. The experiment on which Ham worked used a powerful searchlight to induce the types of flash burns that might result from nuclear bomb explosions.
Ham said the experiment was first tried on himself and Dr. Everett I. Evans, an internationally recognized researcher on burns and leader of the project under the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command.
``They were little flash burns about the size of a dime,'' Ham said. The burns were made on the upper arm and were first- or second-degree burns.
Later, the tests were conducted on MCV medical student volunteers and on some volunteer biology students from Virginia Union University, he said. All the volunteers were paid.
According to the final study published in the February 1955 issue of the journal Surgery and in a 1958 issue of the journal Surgical Forum, 44 white and 20 black students volunteers took part in the experiment.
In another experiment, Honicker claimed that MCV doctors injected radioactive material into some patients with burns, ``knowing that, in earlier experimentation in their labs, the combined effect of burns and radiation led to significantly increased mortality rates in animals.''
Dr. Hermes Kontos, acting dean of the medical school, said the patients received a standard test - used in medical centers throughout the country then and still widely used in principle - involving a radioactive form of phosphorus.
A sample of the patient's blood is taken; that sample is injected with a small amount of the radioactive phosphorus, and the sample is re-injected in the patient.
Honicker said Sunday that other substances also were used by the MCV investigators, and he said they did the tests knowing from their own animal studies that radiation combined with burn injuries increases the chances of death.
Kontos said the animals in the study were exposed to a number of radioactive materials. Those materials were not used on any of the burn patients, who were injected with the phosphorus as a diagnostic tool.
In response to Honicker's charges, Virginia Commonwealth University issued a statement saying the studies at its medical college were conducted openly and ``with the highest scientific and medical standards.''
``Contrary to assertions in Honicker's article, radiation experiments were not conducted on patients who participated in the study via their burn treatment at MCV,'' the statement said.
Meanwhile, a national group that represents people subjected to radiation from past atomic bomb tests on Monday urged patients to come forward who may have had radiation exposures as a result of being treated for burns at MCV.
``We're not alleging anything. ... We're saying, look, these are serious charges,'' said E. Cooper Brown, executive director of the National Committee for Radiation Victims, a nonprofit, Washington-based group.
{KEYWORDS} RADIATION EXPERIMENT by CNB