Lapses by American Leaders Seen in Syphilis Tests (1940s)

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Source: The New York Times

The highest medical and legal officials of the American government and experts at Harvard and other top medical schools approved venereal disease experiments on people in the 1940s, which led to the deliberate infection of Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis to test penicillin, a White House bioethics panel reported Tuesday.

The experiments were “gross violations of ethics” not just by today’s standards but by those of the time, said the report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. It called the experiments “especially egregious moral wrongs because many of the individuals involved held positions of public institutional responsibility.”

President Obama apologized for the experiments to President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala last year, after they were revealed. The ethical errors were made by a startling array of public health luminaries. The surgeon general, the attorney general, Army and Navy medical officials, the president of the American Medical Association, the president of the National Academy of Sciences and experts from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Rochester gave advance approval in principle for experiments that deliberately infected people with venereal diseases, though not all those in authority knew exactly whom the researchers would infect.

World War II fervor and the excitement over penicillin, then a scarce, new drug, contributed to the rush to test this promising medicine against venereal diseases that commonly afflicted soldiers. Until mid-1944, the military relied on ineffective 35-year-old prophylaxis, including rubbing on calomel lotion to prevent syphilis and squirting silver proteinate up the urethra to prevent gonorrhea. The latter was painful, and soldiers often refused it.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/health/14syphilis.html