Apparition
1st October 2010, 03:51 PM
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 1, 2010 5:24pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.
In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.
"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices," the statement said.
Guatemala condemned the experiment as a crime against humanity and said it would study whether there were grounds to take the case to an international court.
"President Alvaro Colom considers these experiments crimes against humanity and Guatemala reserves the right to denounce them in an international court," said a government statement, which announced a commission to investigate the matter.
Guatemalan human rights activists called for the victims' families to be compensated, but a U.S. official said it was not clear there would be any compensation.
President Barack Obama called Colom to offer his personal apology for what had happened, a White House spokesman said.
The experiment, which echoed the infamous 1960s Tuskegee study on black American men who were deliberately left untreated for syphilis, was uncovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
696 EXPOSED TO STD
Reverby found out about it this year while following up on a book about Tuskegee and, unusually for a researcher, informed the U.S. government before she published her findings.
"In addition to the penitentiary, the studies took place in an insane asylum and an army barracks," Reverby said.
"In total, 696 men and women were exposed to the disease and then offered penicillin. The studies went on until 1948 and the records suggest that, despite intentions, not everyone was probably cured," she said in a statement.
Her findings, to be published in January in the Journal of Policy History, link the Tuskegee and Guatemalan studies.
"In 1946-48, Dr. John C. Cutler, a Public Health Service physician who would later be part of the Syphilis Study in Alabama in the 1960s and continue to defend it two decades after it ended in the 1990s, was running a syphilis inoculation project in Guatemala, co-sponsored by the PHS, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government," she wrote.
...
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6903RZ20101001
How reprehensible.
I wonder other despicable crimes the U.S. gov't committed in the past that will likely be revealed in the future.
WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 1, 2010 5:24pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.
In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.
"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices," the statement said.
Guatemala condemned the experiment as a crime against humanity and said it would study whether there were grounds to take the case to an international court.
"President Alvaro Colom considers these experiments crimes against humanity and Guatemala reserves the right to denounce them in an international court," said a government statement, which announced a commission to investigate the matter.
Guatemalan human rights activists called for the victims' families to be compensated, but a U.S. official said it was not clear there would be any compensation.
President Barack Obama called Colom to offer his personal apology for what had happened, a White House spokesman said.
The experiment, which echoed the infamous 1960s Tuskegee study on black American men who were deliberately left untreated for syphilis, was uncovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
696 EXPOSED TO STD
Reverby found out about it this year while following up on a book about Tuskegee and, unusually for a researcher, informed the U.S. government before she published her findings.
"In addition to the penitentiary, the studies took place in an insane asylum and an army barracks," Reverby said.
"In total, 696 men and women were exposed to the disease and then offered penicillin. The studies went on until 1948 and the records suggest that, despite intentions, not everyone was probably cured," she said in a statement.
Her findings, to be published in January in the Journal of Policy History, link the Tuskegee and Guatemalan studies.
"In 1946-48, Dr. John C. Cutler, a Public Health Service physician who would later be part of the Syphilis Study in Alabama in the 1960s and continue to defend it two decades after it ended in the 1990s, was running a syphilis inoculation project in Guatemala, co-sponsored by the PHS, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government," she wrote.
...
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6903RZ20101001
How reprehensible.
I wonder other despicable crimes the U.S. gov't committed in the past that will likely be revealed in the future.