U.S. Hospital Sued For Deliberately Spreading STDs in Guatemala
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/U.S.-Hospital-Sued-For-Deliberately-Spreading-STDs-in-Guatemala-20150402-0021.html
The U.S. government in partnership with Johns Hopkins University ran a 1940’s program that spread syphilis in the Central American country.
Over 750 plaintiffs filed a billion-dollar lawsuit on Wednesday against Johns Hopkins Hospital System Corp, for having deliberately infected people in Guatemala with sexually transmitted diseases without their consent in the late 1940s. They argued that John Hopkins and the Rockefeller Foundation both played a major role in the U.S. governmental program, as they “exercised control over, supervised, supported, encouraged, participated in and directed the course of the experiments,” said the suit.
The scientific team first infected Guatemalan sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, then let them have sex with soldiers and prison inmates in order to spread the disease, reported the Guardian.
Later, the researchers started infecting orphans, school children and psychiatric hospital patients without their consent. The program was meant to give “researchers the opportunity to test additional methods of infecting humans with venereal disease easily hidden from public scrutiny.”
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the researchers and their hierarchy acknowledged the unethical nature of the study, as their correspondence shows.
When the scandal exploded in 2010, President Barack Obama apologized for the study, calling it “clearly unethical.”
Johns Hopkins's lawyer Robert Mathias denied any direct responsibility of the institution in the case, claiming that “when doctors and scientists are acting on those committees they are acting on behalf of the federal government and not on the behalf of the research university or hospital they came from.”
The Rockefeller Foundation followed a similar line, saying that it had no knowledge of the experiments.
A federal judge in 2012 rejected a lawsuit that Guatemalan victims had filed against eight U.S. state officials, ruling that they could not be held liable for actions committed in other countries.
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