Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

 

Unethical U.S.-funded research caused 83 deaths in Guatemala

August 30, 2011

Julia Sick/GHRC -- In a US-funded program during the 1940’s designed to study the effects of penicillin, researchers infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers with syphilis and gonorrhea, none of whom were informed of the procedure. In total, approximately 1,300 people were exposed to or inoculated with venereal diseases between 1946 and 1948, less than 700 of which received any kind of treatment.

President Obama established the Presidential Commission on the Study of Bioethics in November of last year to investigate the research program after it was discovered last year (see article below). The Commission plans to publish its first full report next month outlining the historical facts of the case. So far, the Commission has declared the syphilis project an ‘institutional failure’ and a ‘shameful piece of medical history,’ recognizing the grave violations and inhumane conduct that took place in Guatemala. Furthermore, according to the commission, the program resulted in the deaths of 83 people unwillingly infected with diseases.

Documentation of the research was acquired by the National Security Archives earlier this year, ‘consisting of some 12,000 pages of reports, correspondence, patient records, and graphic
photographs of the effects of syphilis infection on Guatemalan subjects.’ According to the reports, the initial experiments were preformed in Guatemala’s Central Penitentiary, where U.S. researchers paid infected prostitutes to transmit the diseases by having sex with prisoners. When this method proved inefficient, the team of researchers began targeting the country’s insane asylum, where they could easily access hundreds of vulnerable men and women unable to speak for or understand their rights. The NSA analysis of the documents reveals that the doctors and scientists involved were fully aware that what they were doing was unethical and violated research standards, even skeptical at times.

In an interview with Prensa Libre, Amy Gutmann, the president of the Presidential Commission on the Study of Bioethics, declared that the researchers and doctors who participated in the syphilis study are morally responsible, given that they were well aware of the ethical standards they were violating. Gutmann said that the commission plans to recommend compensation to the victims in its upcoming published report. The Guatemalan government announced on August 29th that five survivors of the syphilis and gonorrhea experiments will be medically examined to determine any lasting effects of their infections. Vice-president Rafael Espada made the announcement after the presidential commission revealed that the experiments left 83 people dead.

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U.S. apologizes for infecting Guatemalans with STDs in the 1940s

October 1, 2010

Washington (exerpted from CNN) -- The United States apologized Friday for a 1946-1948 research study in which people in Guatemala were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

The scientific investigation, called the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study of 1946-1948, aimed to gauge the effectiveness of penicillin to treat syphilis, gonorrhea and chancres. Penicillin was a relatively new drug at the time.

The tests were carried out on female commercial sex workers, prisoners in the national penitentiary, patients in the national mental hospital and soldiers. According to the study, more than 1,600 people were infected: 696 with syphilis, 772 with gonorrhea and 142 with chancres.

A similar study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, on nearly 400 poor African-American men with syphilis whose disease was allowed to progress without treatment. The subjects were not told they were ill with the disease.

The Guatemala study was discovered and exposed by Wellesley professor Susan Reverby. It was carried out under the direction of U.S. Public Health Service physician John C. Cutler, who later ran the Tuskegee experiment, said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes for Health.

Collins told reporters that the Guatemala study represented "a dark chapter in the history of medicine."

U.S. officials said Friday that ethical safeguards would prevent such abuses from occurring today.

"The study is a sad reminder that adequate human subject safeguards did not exist a half-century ago," the U.S. statement said. "Today, the regulations that govern U.S.-funded human medical research prohibit these kinds of appalling violations."

A statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the action "reprehensible." President Obama called Guatemalan President Colom to apologize, as did Secretary Clinton.

Colom said an international, independent commission will carry out an investigation.

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Read full article at CNN.com

See also: NY Times

Amy Goodman interviews Susan Reverby on Democracy Now

 

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