Because of the high cost of AZT, reputed to be highly effective preventing the transmission of the AIDS virus to newborns, only half of the women enrolled in AIDS studies are receiving the drug.

Critics are comparing U.S. behavior in these foreign experiments to the outrageous Tuskegee experiment in which poor African-Americans suffering from syphilis were led to believe they were receiving treatment when, in fact, they were not.

Dr. Peter Lurie, of Public Citizen, an advocacy group, says "We have turned our backs on these mothers and their babies."

Responding to Dr. Lurie's criticism, U.S. health officials say that the financially strapped women in question would hardly be able to afford aspirin, much less AZT, and that U.S. experimenters are, at least, providing half of the women with medical treatment. What the remaining women do not receive, they seem to be saying, will hurt them, but they're no worse off than they would been otherwise if U.S. treatments were absent. At least half of the regimen AZT is real, they insist "In the United States, the cost of AZT runs at approximately $1,000 per mother. U.S. studies on HIV+ mothers are presently taking place in seven nations. AZT has been shown in previous studies to cut the risk of transmission to babies by at least two-thirds.

The studies are being conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Defending the use of placebo pills, both the CDC and NIH insist that the use of dummy pills is the only reliable method they know to assure accuracy in their studies.

The likenesses to the Tuskegee experiments, say critics, hark back to government scientists who watched syphilis-infected poor people waste away and die under the impression that their government was providing them with proper care Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania insists that if such methods were employed today in the United States that the cheaply funded studies would have to be conducted "through a sea of demonstrators and a sea of reporters."

The executive director of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, says "Some of the same arguments that were made in favor of the Tuskegee study many years ago are emerging in a new form in the AZT studies in the third world".