Thread: U.S. apologizes for 1940s medical experiments on Guatemalans

Oct 01, 2010

U.S. apologizes for 1940s medical experiments on Guatemalans injected with STDs
09:04 AM

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today apologized for "abhorrent" and "clearly unethical" medical experiments in the 1940s in which U.S. Public Health Service doctors injected Guatemalan patients with syphilis and gonorrhea without their knowledge to study the effect of venereal disease.

Read the full statement below.

Earlier postings: Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service injected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in the 1940s without their knowledge or consent in a study of the effects of venereal disease, NBC news reports.

Information on the experiment was discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College, and can be seen today on her website. Read a synopsis of her findings here and the full report here.

Reverby says the "syphilis inoculation project" was co-sponsored by the PHS, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government.

She says one of the doctors was also involved in the infamous "Tuskegee" syphilis study in which hundreds of already infected African-American men in Alabama were left untreated for 40 years while doctors observed the effects of the disease.

The Guatemala project involved 696 people, including prisoners and mental health patients.

Reverby writes:

The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it on to the prisoners ... and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded when the 'normal exposure' produced little disease or in a few cases through spinal punctures.

She notes that unlike in the Tuskegee experiments in Alabama, the subjects in Guatemala were given penicillin after they contracted the illness, although she says it is unclear whether everyone was cured or received adequate treatment.

NBC News reporter Robert Bazell says mental patients and prostitutes were unwittingly injected in the experiments from 1946 to 1948.

He says the samples used in the experiment were taken from a health facility in Staten Island and that the Guatemalan government was "fully cooperative" in the project.

Update at 12:11 p.m. ET: Clinton and Sebelius issued an apology from the U.S. government in a joint statement:


The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical. 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 conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the United States, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala. The study is a sad reminder that adequate human subject safeguards did not exist a half-century ago.

Today, the regulations that govern U.S.-funded human medical research prohibit these kinds of appalling violations. The United States is unwavering in our commitment to ensure that all human medical studies conducted today meet exacting U.S. and international legal and ethical standards. In the spirit of this commitment to ethical research, we are launching a thorough investigation into the specifics of this case from 1946. In addition, through the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues we are also convening a body of international experts to review and report on the most effective methods to ensure that all human medical research conducted around the globe today meets rigorous ethical standards.

The people of Guatemala are our close friends and neighbors in the Americas. Our countries partner together on a range of issues, and our people are bound together by shared values, commerce, and by the many Guatemalan Americans who enrich our country. As we move forward to better understand this appalling event, we reaffirm the importance of our relationship with Guatemala, and our respect for the Guatemalan people, as well as our commitment to the highest standards of ethics in medical research.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... -consent/1

huh? Where in the hell did this come from and why have i never heard of this before in my entire life despite my devotion to American politics and history?

Is this real or is this propaganda?

W

[quote]Susan M. Reverby

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Home > Faculty > Susan Reverby


Contact Information

sreverby@wellesley.edu

Telephone: 781.283.2535 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 781.283.2535 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

NEWS:

Susan M. Reverby’s research on an immoral government medical study in Guatemala between 1946-48 where men and women were given syphilis has led to a U.S. government response from the Secretaries of the Departments of State and Health and Human Services. A copy of the synopsis and pre-copy edited version of her article,, “'Normal Exposure' and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS 'Tuskegee' Doctor in Guatemala, 1946-48" in press with the Journal of Policy History, are available here.

Reverby, “’Normal Exposure,’â€

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

huh? Where in the hell did this come from and why have i never heard of this before in my entire life despite my devotion to American politics and history?

Is this real or is this propaganda?

W

It's real.
You didn't hear about it because the government didn't want anyone to hear about it.

The U.S. did experiments like this on African Americans in the south too.

Tuskegee syphilis experiment
Wikipedia
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or .... the Tuskegee Study began by offering lower class African Americans, ..... "The Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis". South Med J 65 (10): 1247–51. ...

History - Study termination and aftermath - Ethical implications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_s ... experiment

Yet another reason to focus more on our country and less on the affairs of other countries.

We're broke anyway.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

huh? Where in the hell did this come from and why have i never heard of this before in my entire life despite my devotion to American politics and history?

Is this real or is this propaganda?

W

It's real.
You didn't hear about it because the government didn't want anyone to hear about it.

C'mon, the government would never try to cover something like this up. It's just another conspiracy theory. And I'm sure there's nothing else the government is doing right now, or has been doing for the past few years, that is "abhorrent" and "clearly unethical" that they'd ever try to keep from the people.

I would like to know how long they investigated this study before making an apology. According to this article the Guatamalen leaders gave the okay to experiment on their citizens. So they knew about this study.

US Admits To Giving Guatemalans STDs

WASHINGTON -- American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over "such reprehensible research."

The discovery dredges up past wrongs in the name of science - like the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in this country that has long dampened minority participation in medical research - and could complicate ongoing studies overseas that depend on cooperation from some of the world's poorest countries to tackle tough-to-treat diseases

Uncovering it gives "us all a chance to look at this and - even as we are appalled at what was done - to redouble our efforts to make sure something like this could never happen again," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was uncovered by a Wellesley College medical historian. It apparently was conducted to test if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent some sexually transmitted infections. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

"We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama had been briefed about the situation and planned to call Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom.

"Obviously this is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible," Gibbs said. "It's tragic and the U.S. by all means apologizes to all those who were impacted."

Guatemalan Embassy official Fernando de la Cerda said his country hadn't known anything about the experiment until Clinton called to apologize Thursday night.

"We appreciate this gesture from the USA, acknowledging the mistake and apologizing," he said. "This must not affect the bilateral relationship."

Strict regulations today make clear that it is unethical to experiment on people without their consent, and require special steps for any work with such vulnerable populations as prisoners. But such regulations didn't exist in the 1940s.

The U.S. government ordered two independent investigations to uncover exactly what happened in Guatemala and to make sure current bioethics rules are adequate. They will be led by the prestigious Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Wellesley College historian Susan Reverby made the discovery while combing the archived records of Dr. John Cutler, a government researcher involved in the Tuskegee study that from 1932 to 1972 tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis without ever offering them treatment.

She discovered that Cutler also led the Guatemala project that went a step further: A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea - through jail visits by prostitutes or, when that didn't infect enough people, by deliberately inoculating them. They were offered penicillin, but it wasn't clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated.

She reported that the U.S. had gained permission from Guatemalan officials to conduct the study, but did not inform the experimental subjects.

While secretly trying to infect people with serious diseases is abhorrent today, the Guatemalan experiment isn't the only example from what Collins on Friday called "a dark chapter in the history of medicine." Forty similar deliberate-infection studies were conducted in the United States during that period, Collins said.

"We've made some obvious moral progress" in protecting the poor and powerless, said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist. "The sad legacy" of past unethical experiments is that "they still shape who it is that we can get to trust medical researchers."

A continuing ethical dilemma in developing countries is what Caplan calls the "left-behind syndrome," when the people who helped test a treatment can never afford the resulting care.

"It's still ethically contentious as to how we ought to conduct, or whether we ought to conduct, certain forms of research in poor nations today," he said.

Reverby, whose work was first reported by NBC News, made the discovery last year and gave a speech about it at a medical historians' meeting in May, which a U.S. health official heard. She provided her findings to the government the next month, resulting in Friday's apology, and has posted them on her website.

The revelation of abuses by a U.S. medical research program is only the latest chapter in the United States' troubled history with the impoverished Central American nation, which has a per capita gross domestic product about half of that of the rest of Central America and the Caribbean.

The U.S. helped topple the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and backed several hardline governments during a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996 and cost 200,000 lives.

http://bit.ly/cfvYZS
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Originally Posted by butterbean

. . . According to this article the Guatamalen leaders gave the okay to experiment on their citizens. So they knew about this study.

The Guatemalan government knowing about this and approving it doesn't make it legal, ethical or moral.

You can't experiment on people without their knowledge and permission.

NBC News reporter Robert Bazell says mental patients and prostitutes were unwittingly injected in the experiments from 1946 to 1948.

She reported that the U.S. had gained permission from Guatemalan officials to conduct the study, but did not inform the experimental subjects.