Guatemalans Deliberately Infected with Syphilis by U.S. Researchers
August 30th, 2011This is definitely not news to anyone who has looked into medical atrocities, but I like to note these stories as they recur in mainstream sources.
See Columbia University Brain Imaging Center Routinely Injected Mental Patients with Drugs that Contained Potentially Dangerous Impurities for several references on atrocities related to human medical experimentation.
Via: Global Post:
U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea, and knew they were committing ethical violations, a U.S. presidential panel has found.
The researchers infected hundreds of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases as part of research in the 1940s to study the effects of penicillin. They did so without telling the Guatemalans that it was being done or that they were participants in a study, BBC reports.
The research is a “shameful piece of medical history,” Amy Gutmann, head of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, said in a statement.
“It is important that we accurately document this clearly unethical historical injustice. We do this to honor the victims.”
Of the about 5,500 Guatemalans involved in the research, some 1,300 were infected with a sexually transmitted disease, the commission found. Of those, about 700 received treatment. Eighty-three participants died by 1954.
“In the government-sponsored studies conducted in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, doctors tried to infect prisoners, soldiers and mental patients by giving them prostitutes who were carrying the diseases or were infected by the researchers. The researchers also scraped sensitive parts of subjects’ anatomy to expose wounds to disease-causing bacteria, poured infectious pus into subjects’ eyes, and injected some victims’ spines,” the Washington Post reports.
