U.S. Researchers Intentionally Infected Guatemalans With STDs In The 1940s
Sort of like the Tuskegee experiment, but instead of infecting poor black men in America, we attacked foreign nationals with disease.
U.S. Researchers Intentionally Infected Guatemalans With STDs In The 1940s | TPMMuckraker
About 60 years ago, the United States government intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission.
The report is based on a study by Susan M. Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College.
"In 1946-48, Dr. John C. Cutler, a PHS physician who would later be part of the Syphilis Study in Alabama in the 1960s and continue to defend it two decades after it ended in the 1990s, was running a syphilis inoculation project in Guatemala, co-sponsored by the PHS, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization), and the Guatemalan government," Reverby, wrote.
U.S. taxpayers, through the Public Health Service (PHS), paid for prostitutes who tested positive for either syphilis or gonorrhea to offer their services to the inmates in Guatemala City's Central Penitentiary. Uninfected prostitutes, in another set of experiments, had inoculum of the diseases placed on their cervixes before the sexual visits began, and tests were done on inmates both prior to the prostitutes' visits and afterwards to see if they were infected.
