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Sorry: US Apologizes for Syphilis and Gonorrhea Experiments on Guatemalans
US researchers infected patients with STDs without their consent in the 1940s
US government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius apologized for the United States Friday for funding a 1940s study in which hundreds of Guatemalans were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea without their consent.
(AFP/Alex Wong) Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.
About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service.
"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," according to the joint statement from Clinton and Sebelius. "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 apology was directed to Guatemala and to Hispanic residents of the United States, according to officials.
A telebriefing with Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and Arturo Valenzuela, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Affairs is expected around 11 a.m. ET.
The episode raises inevitable comparisons to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, the Alabama study where hundreds of African-American men were told they were being treated for syphilis, but in fact were denied treatment. That U.S. government study lasted from 1932 until press reports revealed it in 1972.
The Guatemala experiments, which were conducted between 1946 and 1948, never provided any useful information and the records were hidden.
They were discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College, and was posted on her website.
According to Reverby's report, the Guatemalan project was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The experiments involved 696 subjects - male prisoners and female patients in the National Mental Health Hospital.
The researchers were trying to determine whether the antibiotic penicillin could prevent early syphilis infection, not just cure it, Reverby writes. After the subjects were infected with the syphilis bacteria - through visits with prostitutes who had the disease and direct inoculations - Reverby notes that it is unclear whether they were later cured or given proper treatment.
Reverby, who has written extensively about the Tuskegee experiments, found the evidence while conducting further research on the Alabama syphilis study.
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71 Comments so far
Show AllJust another hollow apology. Ooops, you caught us...sorry! When dealing with the US Government or it's compliant corporate media, believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see!
I didn't take the time to read all the comments. Hope this is not a duplicate.
I wonder if we all realize we are now becoming a huge human experiment with the advent of uncontrolled GMO food in our agricultural system Monsanto is using us all.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The corporate press surprisingly reported this story and cited the link between the Guatemalan experimenters and the same bunch of mad scientists who conducted the Tuskegee atrocities. But what the corporate press still covers up is the much larger and longer program of chemical and radiological human experiments that the U.S. conducted on its own adults and children between 1946 and the early 1970s. The decision of a government committee that those experiments violated medical standards of the era in which they were conducted was broadcast on the PBS News Hour the same exact day as the corporate media focussed on the verdict of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, and that REAL news has never been aired in the corporate McMedia.
Disgusting. I am also remembering the LSD experiments they conducted on American soldiers without their knowledge or permission. I am guessing things haven't changed that much, given the fact that they employ doctors in service of "medically legitimate" torture.
What other nightmares will be revealed over the years?
Not to mention that they have a lot more apologizing to do for the essentially immoral structure of our health care delivery system, a structure Kathleen Sebelius has supported in service of keeping the health insurance companies in business, in her very own words.
Good picture of her, for a change.
how about an apology for the US experiments in Iraq and Afganistan on the effects of depleted uranium on human fetuses?
The worst thing about this story is that it's far from the worst thing the US has done to Guatemala. The 1954 coup that destroyed democracy for 40 years was bad, but the US-supported genocide that peaked in the 1980s is one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. Evangelical nutjobs like Pat Robertson went further, supporting the monstrous, but also fellow evangelical, Efraín Ríos Montt.
Meanwhile Israel supplied both weapons and training. Victor Perera, a Guatemalan Jewish intellectual and writer of "Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy", noted that more than half of Mayans murdered by the counterinsurgency forces from 1978 onwards were committed with Israeli firearms. Israel's kinship with the oligarchy that had long oppressed the Maya and maintained a brutal caste system in their domain is particularly interesting, as the same were true with the alliance with apartheid South Africa. That this led to policies of extermination and genocide should be remembered, especially if you read the accounts of the stomach-churning savagery visited upon Mayan peasants during the period.
OOPS - Sorry about that. We never should have been caught.
The US prosecuted Nazi Drs. for similar experiments, and then took some of the Drs. to the US to develop these experiments. I found the name, Dr. Otto Bickenback , a Nazi Dr who worked with chemical gas, here in the US.
Very similar to the Agent Orange experiments. Only the Vietnamese sought compensation.
But the defense claimed that "they didn't know it was harmful" and "it wasn't considered a harmful substance" and "there were no laws against using it."
Always a series of lies to justify deliberate corruption and violence. There will probably be no compensation ever, and if they were so "lucky," it would be a few pennies and a door slammed in their faces.
This is all unfortunately very typical of the US...
Yes, posted this in here (C.D) several times..
"By Edwin Black
Mr. Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the just released War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, from which the following article is drawn.
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans,"
~sc
Seems like the only good thing that maybe should be mentioned is that penicillin IS EFFECTIVE AGAINST INFECTION FROM A WHOLE PILE OF STDs, so it is probable that not much damage was actually done, and the world DID get a cure for these diseases.
Not entirely a terrible as it might at first appear, though inexcusable, none the less.