Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Mailman School of Public Health, 722 West 168th Street, Room 934, New York, NY 10032, USA.
Am J Public Health. 2012 Nov;102(11):e19-33. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.301004. Epub 2012 Sep 20.
In 2001, Maryland's court of appeals was asked to decide whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University had engaged in unethical research on children. During the 1990s, Johns Hopkins's Kennedy Krieger Institute had studied 108 African American children, aged 6 months to 6 years, to find an inexpensive and "practical" means to ameliorate lead poisoning. We have outlined the arguments in the case and the conundrum faced by public health researchers as they confront new threats to our health from environmental and industrial insults. We examined the case in light of contemporary public health ideology, which prioritizes harm reduction over the historical goals of prevention. As new synthetic toxins-such as bisphenyl A, polychlorinated biphenyls, other chlorinated hydrocarbons, tobacco, vinyl, and asbestos-are discovered to be biologically disruptive and disease producing at low levels, lead provides a window into the troubling dilemmas public health will have to confront in the future.
2001 年，马里兰州的上诉法院被要求裁定约翰霍普金斯大学的研究人员是否对儿童进行了不道德的研究。在 20 世纪 90 年代，约翰霍普金斯大学的肯尼迪克里格研究所研究了 108 名 6 个月至 6 岁的非裔美国儿童，以寻找一种廉价且“实用”的方法来减轻铅中毒。我们概述了案件中的论点以及公共卫生研究人员在面对来自环境和工业污染对我们健康的新威胁时所面临的困境。我们根据当代公共卫生思想来审视这个案例，这种思想将减少伤害置于预防的历史目标之上。随着新的合成毒素——如双酚 A、多氯联苯、其他氯化碳氢化合物、烟草、乙烯基和石棉——被发现具有生物破坏性，并在低水平下产生疾病，铅为公共卫生在未来必须面对的令人困扰的困境提供了一个窗口。
