Thread: Guatemala revelation recalls era of research abuses

Guatemala revelation recalls era of research abuses

Updated 11m ago
By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

Susan Reverby describes three studies as the "trinity" of unholy medical research. Doctors at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in New York City injected patients with live cancer cells. At Willowbrook State School, also in New York, researchers gave mentally disabled children hepatitis. In Tuskegee, Ala., doctors withheld treatment from black subjects to study the course of advanced syphilis.
Now there's a fourth.

On Friday, the U.S. government revealed that Reverby has unearthed a U.S.-sponsored study in Guatemala, where doctors in the 1940s infected soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. All traces of the study, which involved as many as 1,500 men and women, lay buried in a University of Pittsburgh archive, among the papers of researcher John Cutler of the U.S. Public Health Service. Cutler, who died in 2003, would later carry on his syphilis research in Tuskegee.

The disclosure of what National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins called "a dark chapter" in medical history prompted President Obama to call Guatemalan President Ã

Cutler and his co-workers were trying to determine whether they could prevent syphilis with penicillin, a new drug in short supply between 1946 and 1948 when the studies were carried out. Hundreds of unwitting subjects were infected through cuts in their skin or through sex with prostitutes who had syphilis or were infected by researchers.



This is sick... I'm sure glad they can't blame this one on Republicans.

Originally Posted by Captainron

Cutler and his co-workers were trying to determine whether they could prevent syphilis with penicillin, a new drug in short supply between 1946 and 1948 when the studies were carried out. Hundreds of unwitting subjects were infected through cuts in their skin or through sex with prostitutes who had syphilis or were infected by researchers.

This is sick... :( I'm sure glad they can't blame this one on Republicans.

The Tuskegee experiments in the U.S. went on from 1932 to 1972.
I'm pretty sure both parties had presidents during that time period.

Nonconsensual Medical Experiments on Human Beings

The failure to treat this communicable disease violated Alabama law. (pp. .... in 1963 without their consent in the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital case, ...
www.rbs2.com/humres.htm

Willowbrook State School

From Wikipedia
Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with mental retardation located in the Willowbrook neighborhood of Staten Island in New York City from the 1930s until 1987.

The school was designed for 4,000, but by 1965 it had a population of 6,000. At the time it was the biggest state-run institution for the mentally handicapped in the United States.[1] Conditions and questionable medical practices and experiments prompted Sen. Robert Kennedy to call it a "snake pit."[2]

Public outcry led to its closure in 1987 and civil rights legislation protecting the handicapped.

A portion of the grounds and some of the buildings were incorporated into the campus of the College of Staten Island, which moved to Willowbrook in the early 1990s. The rest of the buildings sit abandoned and dilapidated in the Staten Island Greenbelt.

[edit] History
[edit] Construction and early conversion
In 1938, plans were drawn up to build a facility for mentally handicapped children on a 375 acres (1.52 km2) site in the Willowbrook section of Staten Island. Construction was completed in 1942, but instead of opening for its original purpose, it was converted into a United States Army hospital and named Halloran General Hospital, after the late Colonel Paul Stacey Halloran. After World War II, proposals were introduced to turn the site over to the Veterans Administration, but in October 1947, the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene opened its facility there as originally planned, and the institution was named Willowbrook State School.

[edit] Hepatitis studies
Throughout the first decade of its operation, outbreaks of hepatitis were common at the school. Virtually all children developed hepatitis within six months; primarily hepatitis A, then known as 'short incubation hepatitis,' in contrast to hepatitis B, or serum hepatitis, which has a longer incubation. (Hepatitis C was not identified until the late 1980s.) This led to a highly controversial medical study carried out there between 1963 and 1966 by medical researchers Saul Krugman and Robert W. McCollum. Healthy children were intentionally inoculated, orally and by injection, with the virus that causes the disease, then monitored to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating it.[3] A public outcry forced the study to be discontinued. . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

Tuskegee syphilis experiment - Wikipedia

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health Service syphilis study) was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972...
History - Study termination and aftermath - Ethical implications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_s ... experiment

RELATED

US medical tests in Guatemala 'crime against humanity'

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-214206.html

U.S. apologizes for 1940s medical experiments on Guatemalans injected with STDs

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-214087.html

Did the CIA Test LSD in the NYC Subway?

03142010Terrible_Mistake-220.jpg

The author of a new book about the CIA’s hallucinogenic drug tests during the Cold War says there’s evidence the agency used NYC commuters as their experimental subjects. He found documentation of the subway tests—which allegedly occurred in 1950—while researching his nonfiction account. "The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks," H.P. Albarelli told The Post.

One piece of evidence cited in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments is a declassified FBI report from Aug. 25, 1950. "The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed," it says. Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, a former CIA research scientist, says that the aerosol LSD tests did in fact happen, though little is known about their scale and results.

Interestingly, the timing of the hallucinogenic experiments coincides with an incident in which a French town was suddenly seized by insanity that hospitalized 32 people and led to four deaths. Officials blamed moldy rye bread, but the chemical make-up of the fungus resembled that of LSD. It doesn’t seem like an accident that Frank Olson—the CIA research scientist in charge of LSD, who himself became an unwitting subject and later committed suicide—was in France at the time of the outbreak.

Another character in the book is George Hunter White, a Bureau of Narcotics agent with CIA ties, and the administrator of the subway tests, according to Eigelsbach (unfortunately, he says, White’s diary entries about the experiments were destroyed). Sometimes posing as an artist, White would lure passersby to a “safe spaceâ€