The Greatest Lie Part 16

Lin spoke clearly but softly. She reported, "My strep throat and thrush are both gone. I'm still weak, but I feel better every day now. Before you gave me the vouchers, every day was worse. Thank you for giving me the time to rectify my karma before I leave you."

"Thank God that at least one good thing has come from this misbegotten trip," I said. "Really, I am so happy for you. But everything else has gone wrong.

"The Spartan list turned out to be a complete disaster, and now the police are harassing everyone on it, including you and us. Lin, you have to tell us what's going on. What have we gotten ourselves into?"

"I couldn't tell you everything. It has been a source of great shame.

"The study was of the usefulness of Spartan's spermicidal product, nonoxynol-9, N-9 for short, as an inhibitor to the transmission of HIV.

"Another study had suggested that N9 increased rather than diminished HIV transmission, but Spartan had been selling their more expensive N9 condoms and lubricants as beneficial against sexually transmitted diseases.

"The idea of the study was to prove which concentrations of N9 worked best. They wanted to prove that N9 was beneficial in AIDS inhibition."

"And why did Spartan terminate the study?" I demanded.

"The first round of follow-up HIV tests showed the opposite of what they had expected: the subjects who used the more highly concentrated N9 products contracted HIV the fastest and their infections progressed to frank AIDS the quickest. The healthiest subjects were the ones who used the non-spermicidal products.

"They terminated the study before they got statistically significant responses, and so they kept advertising N9 as preventative because they had no statistically significant evidence that it was not at least, no evidence that would withstand scientific review. They just stopped selling the highly concentrated products. There's corporate ethics for you."