AZT Trials
Nation(s) Involved: Zimbabwe and United States of America
Time Period: 1994
HIV/AIDS did not become important in the West until the 1980s and was initially thought to only affect gay men. This turned out not to be true, of course, but the public was hard to sway. Very little was known about medications being formed to treat it at the time. This is likely what led to the AZT trials. The University of Zimbabwe as well as U.S. doctors were involved with the help of the World Health Organization. The testing included 17,000 women from Zimbabwe. They were given azidothymidine, a medication used to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.
Very few of the subjects were made aware of the details or testing methods, nor the effectiveness or potential dangers. Plus, those in the placebo group were never informed of this. Most of the women involved were even used under duress, hoping to prevent their child from having the disease. Roughly half of the women involved were given the placebo, making HIV/AIDS transmission very likely if they had it. The result? Around 1,000 babies were born with HIV/AIDS. The worst part was that proven life-saving drugs already existed that did the same thing as AZT, and none of the women were made aware of this.