Guatemala syphilis experiment
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
-led human experiments conducted in Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
from 1946 to 1948, during the administration of President Truman
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
and President Juan José Arévalo
Juan José Arévalo
Juan José Arévalo Bermejo was the first of the reformist presidents of Guatemala. Preceded by military junta interregnum after a definitive pro-democracy revolt in 1944...
with the cooperation of some Guatemalan health ministries and officials. Doctors infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis
Syphilis
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...
and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent
Informed consent
Informed consent is a phrase often used in law to indicate that the consent a person gives meets certain minimum standards. As a literal matter, in the absence of fraud, it is redundant. An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the...
of the subjects, and treated most subjects with antibiotic
Antibiotic
An antibacterial is a compound or substance that kills or slows down the growth of bacteria.The term is often used synonymously with the term antibiotic; today, however, with increased knowledge of the causative agents of various infectious diseases, antibiotic has come to denote a broader range of...
s. This resulted in at least 83 deaths. In October 2010, the U.S. formally apologized to Guatemala for conducting these experiments.
Experiments
The experiments were led by United States Public Health ServiceUnited States Public Health Service
The Public Health Service Act of 1944 structured the United States Public Health Service as the primary division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare , which later became the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The PHS comprises all Agency Divisions of Health and...
physician John Charles Cutler
John Charles Cutler
John Charles Cutler, M.D. was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service....
, who later took part in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. In archived documents, Dr. Thomas Parran, Jr.
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Thomas Parran, Jr. was an American physician and Public Health Service officer. He was appointed the sixth Surgeon General of the United States from 1936 to 1948.-Early years :...
, the U.S. Surgeon General at the time of the experiments, acknowledged that the Guatemalan work could not be done domestically, and details were hidden from Guatemalan officials.
The experiments were funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau and involved multiple Guatemalan government ministries. A total of about 1500 study subjects were involved although the findings were never published.
Information about these experiments was uncovered by Professor Susan Mokotoff Reverby
Susan Mokotoff Reverby
Susan Mokotoff Reverby is a Wellesley College professor. She has written on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and she uncovered the syphilis experiments in Guatemala.-Biography:...
of Wellesley College. Reverby found the documents in 2005 while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study, in Cutler's archived papers, and shared her findings with United States government officials.
While the Tuskegee experiment followed the natural progression of syphilis in those already infected, in Guatemala doctors deliberately infected healthy people with the diseases some of which are fatal if untreated. The goal of the study seems to have been to determine the effect of penicillin
Penicillin
Penicillin is a group of antibiotics derived from Penicillium fungi. They include penicillin G, procaine penicillin, benzathine penicillin, and penicillin V....
in the prevention and treatment of venereal diseases. The researchers paid prostitutes infected with syphilis to have sex with prisoners and some subjects were infected by directly inoculating them with the bacterium. When the subjects contracted the disease they were given antibiotics, although adequate penicillin therapy was prescribed for 76% of subjects, completion of therapy was documented for only 26%. Francis Collins
Francis Collins (geneticist)
Francis Sellers Collins , is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project . He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Prior to being appointed Director, he founded and...
, the current Director of National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
, called the experiments "a dark chapter in history of medicine" and commented that modern rules absolutely prohibit conducting human subject research without informed consent
Informed consent
Informed consent is a phrase often used in law to indicate that the consent a person gives meets certain minimum standards. As a literal matter, in the absence of fraud, it is redundant. An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the...
.
The study appears to have ended in 1948, partly because of medical “gossip” about the work, and partly because penicillin was costly and in short supply during the war. Although some follow-up laboratory testing and patient observation continued until the early 1950s.
Additionally, similar research was also conducted on the transmission and prophylaxis of gonorrhea
Gonorrhea
Gonorrhea is a common sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The usual symptoms in men are burning with urination and penile discharge. Women, on the other hand, are asymptomatic half the time or have vaginal discharge and pelvic pain...
and chancroid
Chancroid
Chancroid is a sexually transmitted infection characterized by painful sores on the genitalia...
. The subjects for all of the STD experiments consisted of female sex worker
Sex worker
A sex worker is a person who works in the sex industry. The term is usually used in reference to those in the sex industry that actually provide such sexual services, as opposed to management and staff of such industries...
s, prisoners, soldiers, and mental hospital
Mental Hospital
Mental hospital may refer to:*Psychiatric hospital*hospital in Nepal named Mental Hospital...
patients; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services headquartered in Druid Hills, unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, in Greater Atlanta...
acknowledges that "the design and conduct of the studies was unethical in many respects, including deliberate exposure of subjects to known serious health threats, lack of knowledge of and consent for experimental procedures by study subjects, and the use of highly vulnerable populations."
Apology and response
In October 2010, the U.S. government formally apologized and announced that there was no statute of limitations for the violation of human rights in that medical research. In a joint statement, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen SebeliusKathleen Sebelius
Kathleen Sebelius is an American politician currently serving as the 21st Secretary of Health and Human Services. She was the second female Governor of Kansas from 2003 to 2009, the Democratic respondent to the 2008 State of the Union address, and chair-emerita of the Democratic Governors...
said:
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. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices. The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the US, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala.President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
apologized to President Álvaro Colom
Álvaro Colom
Álvaro Colom Caballeros is the President of Guatemala for the 2008–2012 term and leader of the social-democratic National Unity of Hope .-Early years:...
, who had called these experiments "a crime against humanity".
The U.S. government asked the Institute of Medicine
Institute of Medicine
The Institute of Medicine is a not-for-profit, non-governmental American organization founded in 1970, under the congressional charter of the National Academy of Sciences...
to conduct a review of these experiments. Separately, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was created by Executive Order 13521 on November 24, 2009, to succeed the disbanded President's Council on Bioethics. The Commission's leadership and members were appointed by President Barack Obama...
was asked to convene a panel of international experts to review the current state of medical research on humans around the world and ensure that such incidents cannot be repeated. The Commission report, Ethically Impossible: STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948, published in September 2011, concluded that "the Guatemala experiments involved unconscionable basic violations of ethics, even as judged against the researchers' own recognition of the requirements of the medical ethics of the day."
Human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
activists have called for subjects' families to be compensated.
See also
- Human experimentation in the United StatesHuman experimentation in the United StatesThere have been numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects....
- Tuskegee syphilis experiment
- Medical ethicsMedical ethicsMedical ethics is a system of moral principles that apply values and judgments to the practice of medicine. As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practical application in clinical settings as well as work on its history, philosophy, theology, and sociology.-History:Historically,...
- Japanese human experimentations
- Unit 731Unit 731was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese...
- Nazi human experimentationNazi human experimentationNazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were coerced into participating: they did not willingly volunteer and there...
- Nuremberg CodeNuremberg CodeThe Nuremberg Code is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation set as a result of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War.-Background:...
- Guatemala – United States relations