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Slide 2: I'll begin with the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health[1] recommendation to screen the US population for mental illness - 52 million children first. In no other democratic country has the government adopted a policy to screen the population for presumed, undetected, mental illness. The rationale behind this mind-boggling Orwellian nightmare is not improving mental health, but rather increasing life-long consumers of psychoactive drugs and to control behavior. Two NFC recommendations are designed to do just that. TeenScreen is promoted as a suicide prevention model when it in fact, increases the number of children labeled suicidal and depressed.

"Forgotten Children" is an investigative report by Carole Keeton Strayhorn,[1] the Texas Comptroller (2004) who uncovered evidence that 60% of children in the Texas foster care system are being drugged with powerful psychotropic drugs, most of which have not been tested in or approved for use by children. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledges that many of these drugs have serious adverse side effects, both physical and psychological. The Comptroller said she was alarmed that in her review of a single month (November 2003), two powerful antipsychotic drugs -- Risperdal and Zyprexa -- made up half of the drugs prescribed to foster children in Texas. These two drugs have been approved only for adults for the treatment of psychosis - primarily schizophrenia - yet, she found that children as young as four, were receiving these powerful, mind-altering drugs.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit this testimony for the record.

My name is Meryl Nass, M.D., and I have worked for the past twenty years as an emergency physician and internist in community hospitals in the northeastern US. I have also studied many aspects of bioterrorism since 1989. I am the person who first demonstrated, in 1992, that one could investigate an epidemic retrospectively, and prove that it was due to biological warfare, using Rhodesia's 1978-80 anthrax epidemic as a model.[1]

Comments submitted by The Alliance for Human Research Protection
to The National Academy of Sciences
Committee of the Institute of Medicine on Clinical Research Involving Children

AHRP has been closely monitoring pediatric research trends since passage of the FDA Modernization Act of 1997. We believe that medications used in children should be thoroughly tested for safety, effectiveness and appropriate dose. But unlike adults who can exercise their autonomous right to informed consent, children who are enrolled in clinical trials are non-consensual human subjects. They should not, therefore, be made to assume the burden of testing possibly toxic drugs whose safety is unknown.

On June 10, 2003, a panel of experts convened by the federal Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) heard presentations by critics who had filed complaints about $37 million government sponsored, multi-site experiment conducted by major academic institutions participating in the ARDSNetwork, and by the ARDSNet investigators who defend the trial.

The experiment tested two extreme, rarely used methods of mechanical lung ventilation in 861 critically ill, vulnerable patients suffering from acute lung disease (ALD) or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).

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

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.