13. American prisoners in malaria treatment experiments
One malaria study using prisoners as volunteers took place at Stateville Penitentiary, outside Joliet, Illinois, conducted by the University of Chicago, the State Department, and the US Army. Stateville Penitentiary offered a suitable environment in that all daily activities of the volunteers were monitored closely. The researchers offered the volunteers, all white men of similar ages and health conditions, financial inducements of $25 – $100, a small fortune in the economy of the prison system. They isolated the volunteers on a floor of the prison hospital, separating them from the general population, and offered additional inducements including parole reviews and extra privileges. All of the inmate participants volunteered for the study; none were exposed to malaria without their consent.
University of Chicago doctors bred a supply of the appropriate mosquitoes to infect the volunteers. They infected the mosquitoes with a strain of malaria obtained from a military patient who contracted the disease in the Pacific. The volunteers who developed malaria received treatment using a variety of newly developed anti-malarial drugs, including the first use on humans of primaquine. The experimentation at Stateville Penitentiary drew considerable scrutiny from the press at the time, including a photo article in Life Magazine, though by the time the results of the experiments led to a suitable drug for malaria, the war had ended. Primaquine remains the primary anti-malarial drug for most forms of the disease in the 21st century.