African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic STD's ... - Blackherbals.com

African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic
Volume 6, Issue 10 NEWSLETTER October 2011
FEATURED ARTICLES
U.S. INFECTED GUATEMALANS FOR STD TESTS
By Rob Stein
October 2, 2010
Washington Post
The United States revealed on Friday that the
government conducted medical experiments in the
1940s in which doctors infected soldiers, prisoners and
mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other
sexually transmitted diseases.
The experiments, led by a federal doctor who helped
conduct the famous Tuskegee syphilis study in
Alabama, involved about 1,500 men and women who
were unwittingly drafted into studies aimed at
determining the effectiveness of penicillin.
The tests, which were carried out between 1946 and
1948, infected subjects by bringing them prostitutes
who were either already infected or purposefully
infected by the researchers and by using needles to
open wounds that could be contaminated.
"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,"
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health
and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said
in a joint statement apologizing for the experiments.
"We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize
to all the individuals who were affected by such
abhorrent research practices."
President Obama had been briefed about the revelations
and called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom to
"personally express that apology," White House
spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "Obviously, this is
shocking. It's tragic. It's reprehensible," Gibbs said.
The Guatemalan government planned to investigate,
saying it "deeply deplores that these experiments
affected innocent people," according to a statement
issued late in the day.
In addition to exposing another episode of unethical
medical experimentation, officials said the revelations
were concerning because they could further discourage
already often-suspicious minorities and others from
participating in medical research. They also come as U.S.
drug companies are increasingly going to poor, lesseducated
countries to test new drugs and other therapies.
"At a time when so much medical research is global, it
behooves us to take account of what has been done in the
past by American researchers in other countries," said
Susan M. Reverby, a professor in the history of ideas and
professor of women's and gender studies at Wellesley
College in Massachusetts who discovered the
experiments while investigating Tuskegee for a book.
In Tuskegee, perhaps the most notorious medical
experiment in U.S. history, hundreds of African
American men with late-stage syphilis was left untreated
to study the disease between 1932 and 1972. In the
Guatemala case, the subjects were treated, but it remains
unclear whether they were treated adequately or what
became of them.
Reverby discovered the experiments while reading papers
in the University of Pittsburgh's archives from John C.
Cutler, a doctor with the federal government's Public
Health Service who later participated in Tuskegee. He
died in 2003.
"I almost fell out of my chair when I started reading this,"
Reverby said in a telephone interview. "Can you
imagine I couldn't believe it."
The studies were sponsored by the Public Health Service,
the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American
Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health
Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and
the Guatemalan government. The goal was to assess
whether taking penicillin right after sex would prevent
sexually transmitted infections.
Cutler, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes and
colleagues decided to study men in Guatemala City's
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-8- Traditional African Clinic October 2011