She is Kenyan, not Nigerian. The two countries are not next door to each other.

Did the author mean that researchers DO NOT offer the prostitute help in finding another job? If they do offer her help, as the article says, then the rest of the article doesn't reeally make any sense.

She might be offered AIDS education and job training or employment but what was the nature of the work? I don't think there are many jobs for women in Africa that pay as well as what she's doing now. If there was something that pays the same or better and allows her to stay close to her children that's probably what she would do.

It would be nice to see her get something approaching her worth to the company getting her blood. It seems like donors for rare blood types are compensated, why not the rare, special people contributing to such critical research? Why can't someone find funding to see such valuable "subjects" get decent living conditions? It's in the company's best interest to help these people survive.

If you've been having professional, industrial unprotected sex, in Africa for 2 decades and you don't have AIDS then education is kind of meaningless isn't it?

It's irony......

The irony being is that money is being given to these people to tell/show Agness how to get another job.

For twenty years, they've been making money telling Agnes (and more like her) effectively the same thing.

But if the money went directly to Agnes then she wouldn't have to work as a prostitute.

Excuse me while I go lament the level of reading comprehension here.....

"Though medical workers have gotten grants to teach Agnes about the dangers of unprotected sex, they offer her help to actually avoid it by getting another job."

I agree with the other writer: this sentence is contradictory to the meaning of the article. Careless editing?

Meanwhile, over the past 20 years Agnes has been donating her blood to a project that is studying the miraculous immune systems of Agnes and a few other Nigerian prostitutes like her. The project has generated $43 million in research funds aimed at discovering their bodies' secrets. But Agnes' life -- the poverty, the sex work she yearns to escape -- remains essentially the same.

And with $43 million dollars generated, somehow, these researchers haven't been able to find Agnes a job. Not even sorting bottles in the lab funded with her blood money?

Bullshit. Follow the money and you'll find researchers pretending to angst over the duty they owe poor Agnes -- as they walk around in their nice shiny lab.

Total moral crap. How is this different from the Tuskegee Study

related to some Constant Gardiner studies having to do with antibiotics research where Pfizers control groups were intentionally under medicated and the test group was given a wild card of a drug that no one had really a clue about what it would do.

Of course in Nigeria, of which the central government has effectively abandoned the northern Muslim provinces to Sharia, local Imams have declared an end to all polio vaccines as they believe the vaccines make Muslim men impotent. Net result, after each year's Hajj you can plot the growth of polio cases world wide in predominantly Muslim countries.

"Though medical workers have gotten grants to teach Agnes about the dangers of unprotected sex, they offer her help to actually avoid it by getting another job."

They ARE offering her help? Then what's the problem?

Rsearchers are constantly taking more than they give to research subjects in the name of statistical validity. Statistical validity has its place - say, in clinical drug trials. But when your research is premised on the subjects being in horrific conditions - like Agnes, or the homeless, or injection drug users - it is no less than cruel to profit off these subjects without giving something in return.

I've seen studies on heart disease among homeless people that rewarded subjects with gift cards to McDonald's - a cold, cruel irony if ever there was one. And drug use researchers routinely refuse to give subjects anything of value - fearing they will use their compensation to purchase more drugs. Except that the only reason they are of value to the researchers is that, they use drugs. The message then is: we want to study you, but we don't what to support your habit, so we will totally undervalue your contribution to this research and refuse to compensate you appropriately - of course for your own good. Oh, and for statistical validity.