They Were Children First: The Unanswered Questions of the Casa Pia Mercury Trial
It is easy, after twenty years, to turn Casa Pia into an argument about regulatory classification. That would be a mistake. The people at the center of this story were children. They did not design the study. They did not write the protocol. They did not decide which material would be placed in their teeth. They did not select the investigators. They did not determine which outcomes would be measured. They did not decide which data would be available for analysis. And they did not write the regulatory rules that eventually cited the scientific record generated by their participation. Many were already vulnerable before the study began.