Wednesday, October 6, 2010

US medical tests in Guatemala 'crime against humanity'

US testing that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhoea and syphilis more than 60 years ago was a "crime against humanity", Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has said.

President Barack Obama has apologised for the medical tests, in which mentally ill patients and prisoners were infected without their consent.

Mr Obama told Mr Colom the 1940s-era experiments ran contrary to American values, Guatemala said.

The US has promised an investigation.

'Shocking, tragic, reprehensible'

Syphilis can cause heart problems, blindness, mental illness and even death, and although the patients were treated it is not known how many recovered.


Evidence of the programme was unearthed by Prof Susan Reverby at Wellesley College. She says the Guatemalan government gave permission for the tests. ...

The patients - prisoners and people suffering mental health problems - were unaware they were being experimented upon.

The doctors used prostitutes with syphilis to infect them, or inoculation, as they tried to determine whether penicillin could prevent syphilis, not just cure it. ...

via BBC News - US medical tests in Guatemala 'crime against humanity'.

... a Public Health Service team led by physician John C. Cutler infected 696 subjects from the Guatemalan National Penitentiary, an army barracks, and a national mental health hospital.


The U.S. physicians did not get permission from the subjects, she wrote.


“The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it to the prisoners (since sexual visits were allowed by law in Guatemalan prisons) and then did direct inoculations,” either on to the men’s sexual organs, forearms, face or through spinal injections.


via TruthOut



The experiments were funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (now known as the Pan American Health Organization) and involved multiple Guatemalan government ministries. A total of about 1500 study subjects were involved although the findings were never published. Information about these experiments was uncovered by Professor Susan Mokotoff Reverby of Wellesley College. Reverby found the documents in 2005 while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study, in Cutler's archived papers, and shared her findings with United States government officials. - wiki


John Charles Cutler, M.D. (June 29, 1915 - February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal-disease program in the United States Public Health Service. He oversaw the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s. In 1954 he was in charge of experiments at Sing Sing prison to see if a vaccine made from the killed syphilis bacterium, would protect prisoners against infection when he later exposed them to the bacterium. - wiki



The syphilis bacteria is interesting (perhaps to bio-weapons designers) because it evolved quickly over the course of 50 years starting in 1496:
The sex disease syphilis adapted from a severe, debilitating illness to a milder form in order to survive, research suggests.

Dr Robert Knell, of Queen Mary's College, London, argues the disease was too virulent for its own good.

Sufferers became so repellent that they were unlikely to have sex. To ensure that they did, and continued to pass on the bacterium, it had to change.

Dr Knell's theory is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Syphilis in its early form caused disfiguring pustules on the face accompanied by a foul smell.

Dr Knell argues this would have been obvious to any potential sexual partners of a sufferer, enabling people to avoid the infected person and thereby reducing transmission.

Other symptoms, such as agonising pains in the joints, would have effectively disabled the sufferer, or at least distracted them from seeking out new sexual partners.

As a result, less virulent strains of the disease were transmitted more often, thus leading to changes in the severity of the disease. ...

Syphilis first appeared in Europe in 1496 and was known as the Great Pox or French Disease.

At first it caused terrible sickness, including severe ulceration of the part of the body first infected (often the genitals), pustules, soft tissue being eaten away to the bone, and the rapid onset of "gummy" tumours.

However, within 50 years syphilis changed from an acute, severe and debilitating disease to the milder infection that is modern syphilis. ...

via BBC

No horrific photos of people with syphilis will be posted here, but check out the BBC link above for an early Halloween startle.

Obvious question: What are they doing right now that they will apologize for 50 years from now?

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