Victims of 1940s syphilis-inoculation experiment in Guatemala fight for compensation.
| Autor | Reynolds, Louisa |
Between 1946 and 1948, the US Public Health Service (PHS) used 1,500 Guatemalans as human guinea pigs during an experiment in which they infected the Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid without their prior consent. This is the spine-chilling finding published by historian Susan Reverby, from Wellesley College, in October 2010, a story that hit the headlines throughout the world.
Reverby revealed that Professor John Cutler (deceased), from the PHS's Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) inoculated Guatemalan prostitutes, prisoners, soldiers, and mental-health patients with sexually transmitted diseases, as part of a project funded by the Pan American Health Bureau (known today as the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO).
These experiments were carried out with the full knowledge of Juan Funes, director of the Ministerio de Salud's venereal disease department, as well as Cutler's superiors, R.C. Arnold and John F. Mahoney, of the VDRL in Staten Island, New York. The project's findings, which were inconclusive, were not published.
The project aimed to determine under what circumstances penicillin could cure these diseases and how their progression could be stalled immediately after the patient had been exposed to them. The research team chose confined populations that were easily accessible: prisoners in a Guatemala City jail, patients of Guatemala's single mental-health hospital, children from a national orphanage, and soldiers in the capital's military barracks.
Cutler's reports explain that prostitution had just been legalized in Guatemala and sex workers were regularly allowed to visit prisoners. With the collaboration of the Ministerio de Gobernacion and the director of Guatemala City's Sistema Penitenciario Central, prostitutes who had tested positive for syphilis or gonorrhea were allowed to have sexual intercourse with some 1,500 male prisoners.
In another experiment, prostitutes who had tested negative for these diseases were injected in the cervix with tissue extracted from human and animal syphilitic tumors, chancres, or pus from gonorrheal sores before they had contact with the prisoners.
After the prisoners had been examined they were supposedly given doses of penicillin to cure the infection. However, the reports do not mention whether the prostitutes were ever treated.
Although the prisoners were unaware that they were being infected with deadly diseases, many started to oppose the fortnightly blood...
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