FW: [NativeNews] Medical experiment, First Nations children

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Schaefer [mailto:jkschae_98@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 10:03 PM
To: Jim Craven
Subject: Fwd: [NativeNews] Medical experiment, First Nations children


Jon

> Reply-to: NatNews-owner@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [NativeNews] Medical experiment, First Nations
> children
>
> The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, April 26, 2000
> Native children deprived of care
> Preventive dentistry banned during study
> By Michael Valpy
>
> Federal-government doctors withheld specialized dental
> care for children in
> eight aboriginal residential schools in the 1940s and
> 1950s to see what the
> effect would be on their teeth and overall health. The
> specialized dental
> care was withheld as part of a five-year study of
> aboriginal children's
> nutrition. The study's director, Dr. L. B. Pett, the
> retired chief of the
> nutrition division of the Department of National Health
> and Welfare, said
> parental consent was not obtained for the study. Instead,
> the government
> obtained permission from the school principals.
>
> A letter dated Oct. 3, 1949, from Dr. H. K. Brown, chief
> of the
> department's dental health division, said: "It is
> important that during the
> period of this study, no specialized, over-all type of
> dental service
> should be provided, such as the use of sodium fluoride,
> dental prophylaxis
> [professional cleaning] or even urea compounds [used in
> treatment of decay].
>
> "In this study dental caries [decay] and gingivitis [gum
> disease] are both
> important factors in assessing nutritional status. The
> caries index could
> be upset by such specialized dental measures as those
> referred to above. .
> .. ."
>
> The letter -- referring specifically to the United Church
> school in Port
> Alberni, B.C. -- also said that preventive dental
> treatment would make the
> study of "questionable value" in measuring vitamin C
> deficiency.
>
> Fillings and extractions were to continue.
>
> Professor Gary Accursi of the University of Toronto's
> Faculty of Dentistry
> said yesterday that a dental-ethics committee would be
> unlikely to approve
> such a trial today. He said he did not know whether it
> would have passed
> the ethical standards of the time.
>
> A Toronto medical expert on clinical trials, who asked
> not to be
> identified, said the letter, on its face, implied clearly
> that the Canadian
> government was prepared to let aboriginal children suffer
> the effects of
> poor nutrition without intervention so long as its study
> was not adulterated.
>
> Dr. Pett, in an interview yesterday, put the study, which
> he said was
> conducted at eight schools, in a different context. It
> was carried out, he
> said, to improve nutrition for aboriginal children and
> provide information
> on good nutrition for their parents.
>
> Fluoride treatment, now considered one of history's
> greatest public-health
> advances, was then in its infancy.  The first fluoride
> trials in Canada, in
> Stratford and Brantford, were being carried out at the
> time of the study.
> The only thing that bothered Dr. Pett about the study
> from an ethical point
> of view, he said, was the absence of parental consent.
> "Parental consent
> was always an issue," he said. "It was hard to contact
> them. So many were
> in the bush."
>
> So the study went ahead, he said, with the consent of the
> school
> principals, who were given more-or-less legal status as
> in loco parentis
> (in the place of a parent).
>
> The records of the nutritional study were found in
> Ottawa's National
> Archives by freelance writer David Napier, commissioned
> by the Anglican
> Journal, the newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada,
> to inquire into
> aboriginal residential schools. The Journal will publish
> his article, the
> result of eight months research, later this month.
>
> The schools were operated by churches in a contractual
> relationship with
> the federal government for more than a century.
>
> Children as young as five were taken away from their
> families and placed in
> the schools. They were ordered not to use their mother
> tongue and to set
> aside their cultural values and practices.
>
> The Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Churches, along
> with the federal
> government, face hundreds of millions of dollars in
> lawsuits from nearly
> 6,000 former students.
>
> Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail
>
>