Jagger69
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue
Dr. Mengele would be proud. 
Link is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html
U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Experiment in Guatemala
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: October 1, 2010
Top American officials apologized on Friday as they revealed an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which United States government medical researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, soldiers and mental patients with syphilis.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, and other officials called the study “clearly unethical.”
The experiment, overseen by a researcher who would later participate in the infamous Tuskegee study, in which black American male sharecroppers with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades, was done to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
“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,” Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Sebelius said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
The Guatemalan president, Álvaro Colom, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Mrs. Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.”
His government said it would cooperate with an American investigation and carry out its own.
The experiments were discovered by Susan M. Reverby, a medical historian and professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., who has written two books about the Tuskegee study.
From 1946 to 1948, she wrote in an article due to appear in January in The Journal of Policy History, Dr. John C. Cutler, a Public Health Service doctor, ran a syphilis inoculation project in Guatemala, co-sponsored by the health service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government.
The health service, she wrote, “was deeply interested in whether penicillin could be used to prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection, whether better blood tests for the disease could be established, what dosages of penicillin actually cured infection, and to understand the process of reinfection after cures.”
The service was struggling to grow syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid in the laboratory and had been having difficulties with tests using rabbits and chimpanzees.
In 1944, it had deliberately injected prison “volunteers” at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana with lab-grown gonorrhea, but found it hard to infect the men that way and abandoned the study.
Turning to Guatemala, it ultimately chose nearly 700 subjects — men in the national prison and the army as well as men and women in the national mental health hospital.
“Permission was gained from the authorities, but not from individuals, which was not an uncommon practice at the time,” Professor Reverby wrote.
Prostitutes with syphilis were hired to infect prisoners — Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When that failed, in some men the bacteria was poured onto scrapes made on the penis, face or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.
If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics — which was not the case in Tuskegee.
“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear and not everyone received what was even then considered adequate treatment,” Professor Reverby wrote.
Dr. Cutler would later be part of the Tuskegee study in Alabama, which began in 1932 as an observation of how syphilis progressed in black men. In 1972, it was revealed that even after early antibiotics and penicillin were invented in the 1940s, doctors hid that fact from the Alabama men so they could keep studying them. Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, defended the Tuskegee experiment in a 1992 documentary.
Deception was also used in Guatemala, Professor Reverby said. Dr. Thomas Parran, the former surgeon general who oversaw the start of Tuskegee, acknowledged that the Guatemala work could not be done domestically, and details were hidden from Guatemalan officials.
Professor Reverby said she found references to the experiment in a box of Dr. Cutler’s papers at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until 1985, while she was researching Dr. Parran.
“I’m sifting through them, and I find ‘Guatemala ... inoculation ... ’ and I think, ‘What the heck is this?’ she said in an interview. “And then it was ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ My partner was with me, and I said, ‘You aren’t going to believe this.’ ”
Fernando de la Cerda, minister counselor at the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, said that Mrs. Clinton apologized to President Colom in her Thursday phone call.
“We thank the United States for its transparency in telling us the facts,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of reparations for survivors or their descendants, Mr. de la Cerda said that was still unclear.
The public response on the Web sites of Guatemalan news outlets was furious.
One commenter, Cesar Duran, on the site of Prensa Libre wrote: “Apologies ... please ... this is what has come to light, but what is still hidden? They should pay an indemnity to the state of Guatemala, not just apologize.”
Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago’s medical school, was stunned when the experiment was described to him.
“This is shocking,” he said. “This is much worse than Tuskegee — at least those men were infected by natural means.”
In the 1940s, there were no agreed-upon standards about what was ethical in research on human subjects.
Link is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html
