They thought "we're in a war against disease and in war soldiers die."
It's too easy to say "Oh, we'd never do anything like that."
We really need to think about what we're doing now that's going to look horrible in 20 years.
Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby uncovered the records of the Guatemalan experiment.
With the conclusion of the investigation, her work and commentary appeared in the press.
Reverby uncovered the Guatemala archives after years of research into a medical study in Tuskegee, Alabama where hundreds of black American men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis. The experiment lasted 40 years until 1972.
The directors of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health have condemned the U.S. government-funded study in the 1940s that deliberately infected dozens of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases, calling it "regrettable and deeply saddening."
"The 1946-1948 inoculation study should never have happened, and nothing like it should ever happen again," wrote CDC chief Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH, and Francis Collins, MD, PhD, head of the NIH, in a commentary posted online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
They were responding to a Wellesley College historian's revelation last week that a U.S. Public Health Service researcher, with knowledge of supervisors all the way up to the Surgeon General, intentionally infected female sex workers in Guatemala with syphilis, and then paired the prostitutes with male prison inmates.
Inmates as well as mental hospital patients and soldiers in Guatemala also were directly inoculated with the pathogens responsible for syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. Needless to say, the experiments were performed without the individuals' full knowledge or consent.
The research immediately invited comparisons with the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which treatments were withheld from black Southerners with the disease in order to document its natural history over time.
Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby uncovered the records of the Guatemalan experiment.
ReplyDeleteWith the conclusion of the investigation, her work and commentary appeared in the press.
Reverby uncovered the Guatemala archives after years of research into a medical study in Tuskegee, Alabama where hundreds of black American men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis. The experiment lasted 40 years until 1972.
The directors of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health have condemned the U.S. government-funded study in the 1940s that deliberately infected dozens of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases, calling it "regrettable and deeply saddening."
ReplyDelete"The 1946-1948 inoculation study should never have happened, and nothing like it should ever happen again," wrote CDC chief Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH, and Francis Collins, MD, PhD, head of the NIH, in a commentary posted online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
They were responding to a Wellesley College historian's revelation last week that a U.S. Public Health Service researcher, with knowledge of supervisors all the way up to the Surgeon General, intentionally infected female sex workers in Guatemala with syphilis, and then paired the prostitutes with male prison inmates.
Inmates as well as mental hospital patients and soldiers in Guatemala also were directly inoculated with the pathogens responsible for syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. Needless to say, the experiments were performed without the individuals' full knowledge or consent.
The research immediately invited comparisons with the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which treatments were withheld from black Southerners with the disease in order to document its natural history over time.