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U.S. Apologizes For Intentionally Infecting Guatemalans With Syphilis Today, the U.S. delivered what was described as an “unusual apology” to Guatemala for conducting an experiment in the 1940s in which prisoners, soldiers and mental patients were deliberately infected with syphilis. The news came to light while Wellesley College Professor Susan M. Reverby was researching the Tuskegee episode in the U.S. Reverby immediately shared her discovery with U.S. government officials. The apology was issued within 24 hours of the posting of Reverby’s article:
[P]hysicians chose men in the Guatemala National Penitentiary, then in an army barracks, and men and women in the National Mental Health Hospital for a total of 696 subjects. Permissions were gained from the authorities but not individuals, not an uncommon practice at the time, and supplies were offered to the institutions in exchange for access.
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 made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men’s penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded when the “normal exposure” produced little disease, or in a few cases through spinal punctures. Unlike in Alabama, the subjects were then given penicillin after they contracted the illness.
However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear and not everyone received what was even then considered adequate treatment.
Reverby explains that the doctors were well aware that their study was ethically questionable. Surgeon General Thomas Parran himself stated, “You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country [U.S.].” Reverby also writes that much of the study was “kept hushed even from some of the Guatemalan officials and information about the project only circulated in selected syphilology circles.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the studies “clearly unethical.” “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices,” say Clinton and Sebelius in a press release issued today. Despite the apology, no offer of compensation has been made — though an investigation is being launched “into the specifics of the study.”
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) echoed the government’s apology, stating “Ours is the greatest nation on Earth, but this activity in the 1940s constitutes one of our deeply darkest moments.”
Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health claims he is aware of more than 40 other studies “where intentional infection took place with ‘completely inadequate informed consent.’”
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quote:Originally posted by Relentless.: Yet more proof.. Malice, not stupidity.
malice? actaully hubrus-- in Medicine its common, which is the drum i've been pounding about why health care costs too much today..
these medical Doctors that did this justified the Tuskegee expirement as part of the "greater good".
Now, the one world govt people have a direct "play" too.
They can say "we global govt" people can stop a US Govt from doing this to a "little country"... the permission to do it was apparently granted by the Guatamalen govt officials for some "cargo"? So a global govt can outlaw it and it won't happen again...
Cutler and his team, including Guatemalan physician Juan Funes, induced the disease by allowing inmates in the central penitentiary to have sex with infected prostitutes (which was legal in Guatemala), or gave the disease to the prisoners by inoculating their arms, faces or penises with a solution of the bacteria that causes syphilis. Syphilis is a difficult disease to transfer and cannot grow in a culture so Cutler and his team had to work quickly to make the solutions and inoculations.
"In addition to the penitentiary, the studies took place in an insane asylum and an army barracks," Reverby explains. "In total, 696 men and women were exposed to the disease and then offered penicillin. The studies went on until 1948 and the records suggest that despite intentions not everyone was probably cured."
now i'm going to put on my devil horns and ask you if the knowledge gained was worth killing a few people?
if you kill or ruin 100 lives and 1 million people are saved?.....
i don't want to make those decisions... but doctors do it all the time... heck that's the kind of power that attracts the doctor type...
however, as i read up on this i see a clear indication that this not something Congress or the Presdient sent people to go do.. It was cowboys with govt funding...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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apparenty the "cowboy" as i called him, went places-
keep in mind that in '42 were in WW2 and preventing syph was a war effort... syph was widespread among returning troops..
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.[1][2] He oversaw the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s.[3] 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. Those infected were later treated with penicillin.[2][4]
Cutler was born on June 29, 1915 in Cleveland, Ohio to Grace Amanda Allen and Glenn Allen Cutler.[5] He graduated from Western Reserve University Medical School in 1941, and joined the Public Health Service in 1942. In 1943 when he worked as a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Venereal Disease Research Laboratory in Staten Island. He became assistant surgeon general in 1958. In 1967 Cutler was appointed professor of international health at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as chairman of the department of health administration and acting dean of the Graduate School of Public Health in 1968-1969.[1] He died on February 8, 2003 at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh.
this lady that dug this stuff up is writing books, and this type of news sells books...
his "vaccine" didn't didn't work cuz we don't have it now...(unless it's a secret) but he did try to make one, and he even 'sperimented in our prison system too...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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here's something interesting about people, not he disease itself:
The name "syphilis" was coined by the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro in his epic noted poem, written in Latin, titled Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Latin for "Syphilis or The French Disease") in 1530. The protagonist of the poem is a shepherd named Syphilus (perhaps a variant spelling of Sipylus, a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses). Syphilus is presented as the first man to contract the disease, sent by the god Apollo as punishment for the defiance that Syphilus and his followers had shown him.[not in citation given] From this character Fracastoro derived a new name for the disease, which he also used in his medical text De Contagionibus ("On Contagious Diseases").[19]
Until that time, as Fracastoro notes,[not in citation given] syphilis had been called the "French disease" in Italy, Poland and Germany, and the "Italian disease" in France. In addition, the Dutch called it the "Spanish disease", the Russians called it the "Polish disease", the Turks called it the "Christian disease" or "Frank disease" (frengi) and the Tahitians called it the "British disease". These "national" names are due to the disease often being spread by foreign sailors and soldiers during their frequent sexual contact with local prostitutes.[citation n
it was the root of all rasicsm?
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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of all rasicsm?
