US medical tests in Guatemala 'crime against humanity'
BBC
October 2, 2010
US testing that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhoea and syphilis more than 60 years ago was a "crime against humanity", Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has said.
President Barack Obama has apologised for the medical tests, in which mentally ill patients and prisoners were infected without their consent.
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UnawareThe study by Prof Reverby shows that US government medical researchers infected almost 700 people in Guatemala with two sexually transmitted diseases.
The patients - prisoners and people suffering mental health problems - were unaware they were being experimented upon.
The doctors used prostitutes with syphilis to infect them, or inoculation, as they tried to determine whether penicillin could prevent syphilis, not just cure it.
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www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11457552
Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in GuatemalaUS apologizes for performing unethical study in 1940sBy Stephen Smith
Globe Staff / October 2, 2010
Susan M. Reverby discovered the work while doing research. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
Picking through musty files in a Pennsylvania archive, a Wellesley College professor made a heart-stopping discovery: US government scientists in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in experiments conducted without the subjects’ permission.
Medical historian Susan M. Reverby happened upon the documents four or five years ago while researching the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and later shared her findings with US government officials.
The unethical research was not publicly disclosed until yesterday, when President Obama and two Cabinet secretaries apologized to Guatemala’s government and people and pledged to never repeat the mistakes of the past — an era when it was not uncommon for doctors to experiment on patients without their consent.
Even so, Reverby found in the files a story of almost singular exploitation and deception, conducted in a foreign land because, the nation’s surgeon general at the time acknowledged, it could not have been done in the United States.
“I was just completely blown away,’’ Reverby said in an interview. “I was floored.’’
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/10/02/wellesley_professor_unearths_a_horror_syphilis_experiments_in_guatemala/“Normal Exposure” and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS “Tuskegee” Doctor in Guatemala, 1946-48 (Full Text): www.wellesley.edu/WomenSt/Reverby%20Normal%20Exposure.pdf