- LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Between
1954 and 1973 the US Army exposed volunteer soldiers from the Seventh Day
Adventist church to diseases as part of biological warfare testing.
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- As participants in Operation Whitecoat, scientists
exposed
hundreds of healthy male volunteers to diseases so they could study their
reaction, information that could be used in biological warfare.
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- "If those experiments had not shown our
vulnerability
to biological warfare, there would be no biological defence programme
today,"
army immunologist Colonel Arthur Anderson said. "The services during
this outbreak of anthrax would be in the Dark Age."
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- No life-threatening diseases were transmitted but some
debilitating ones were, such as the mosquito-borne sand fly fever.
Researchers
also tested a vaccine for Eastern encephalitis.
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- Army scientists believed the Adventists, who by church
rules are not supposed to smoke or drink alcohol or coffee - would be ideal
for the job.
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- No testers died during Operation Whitecoat, and the army
is now conducting a study of long-term effects on nearly 1 000 of the
volunteers
they have been able to locate.
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- Due to ethical considerations it is unlikely such
experiments
could be repeated today, officials said.
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