U.S. Plan for Developing a Malaria Drug Involved Infecting Mental Patients

December 2, 2014

(Washington Post) – Ten years ago, journalist Karen Masterson was taking a course on making effective use of the records at the National Archives in College Park. For an assignment, she was searching for records on World War II-era blood plasma replacement studies. In a mix-up, she got the wrong box of papers, and she glanced randomly through the documents inside. “One turned my blood cold,” she writes in the introduction to her new book. It was a 1943 letter laying out a plan for federal researchers to infect brain-damaged syphilitics and schizophrenics with malaria so they could be used to test new drugs.