There are new revelations in a case that already read like a horror movie: In the 1940s, the U.S. government paid for medical experiments on the effectiveness of penicillin which included deliberately infecting 1,300 Guatemalan people with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. The Associated Press reports that a presidential panel compared the research to a 1943 experiment on prison inmates in Indiana, but the inmates were volunteers and able to give informed consent.
“Many of the Guatemalan participants received no such explanation and did not give informed consent,” the AP says. “Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.”
The study was carried out by Dr. John Cutler who also did the 1943 syphilis experiment. Cutler acknowledged the violations in in a 1947 letter, saying: "Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine,” the Guardian reported in June. No important information ended up being garnered from the study.
The experiments were discovered by Susan Reverby at Wellesley while she was “researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.”
The AP reports that the new revelations included the fact that only 700 participants received any treatment and 83 people died, though whether their deaths were due to the experiment wasn’t clear. One female patient, who had a terminal illness, was infected with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere; researchers were “curious to see the impact of additional infection.”
“Many of the Guatemalan participants received no such explanation and did not give informed consent,” the AP says. “Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.”
The study was carried out by Dr. John Cutler who also did the 1943 syphilis experiment. Cutler acknowledged the violations in in a 1947 letter, saying: "Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine,” the Guardian reported in June. No important information ended up being garnered from the study.
The experiments were discovered by Susan Reverby at Wellesley while she was “researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.”
The AP reports that the new revelations included the fact that only 700 participants received any treatment and 83 people died, though whether their deaths were due to the experiment wasn’t clear. One female patient, who had a terminal illness, was infected with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere; researchers were “curious to see the impact of additional infection.”
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