Infecting Unsuspecting Poor People With Syphilis-- The Aftermath

Which GOP clown keeps strutting around beating his chest and bellowing that he'll never apologize for the U.S.A.? Mittens, I think, although it could be Newt or Perry or any of the seven dwarves. Last year President Obama was big enough to apologize on behalf of the United States. He apologized for secret "medical" experiments carried out on over two thousand Guatemalans in the 1940s. This even predates the U.S. backing for a fascist dictator in the 1950s who, as we saw last week, brutalized the people interested in emancipation. The experiment involved ethicless medical American researchers working for the U.S. infecting hapless Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, orphans and others with syphilis, something like what the government did earlier-- and later-- to black Americans in Tuskegee. Many died.

"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

"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 statement said.

Guatemala condemned the experiments and said it would study whether there were grounds to take the case to an international court.

"President Alvaro Colom considers these experiments crimes against humanity and Guatemala reserves the right to denounce them in an international court," said a government statement, which also announced the creation of a commission to investigate the matter.

Guatemalan human rights activists called for the victims' families to be compensated, but a U.S. official said it was not clear whether there would be any compensation.

President Obama called Colom to offer his personal apology for what had happened, a White House spokesman said.

Apologies are one thing; paying compensation to the victims, something else entirely. A new report issued Thursday by a presidential bioethics commission looked into the current protections for human subjects in a review triggered by evidence of unethical behavior in the Guatemalan experiments.

The commission earlier this year concluded that U.S. government researchers must have known they were violating ethical standards at the time of the experiment, shortly after World War II. They have also called for a better system to compensate medical research subjects.

Nothing like the horrors of the Guatemala study could take place under U.S. government watch now, the panel said in a report released Thursday.

But the lags in how federal agencies collect and store data about their research involving human subjects offers no assurance that all unnecessary injuries or unethical activity are prevented.

U.S. government agencies last year supported more than 55,000 projects, mostly health-related, involving human subjects. The presidential commission asked 18 agencies that do most of such research to provide basic data about it, such as location of study sites, lead investigators, number of subjects involved and amount of funding designated.

PRI and the BBC reported on the new findings Thursday and I listened on my car radio as I was thinking about my upcoming trip to the region where the experiments were conducted. I'll be on the Mexican side of the border that encompasses the Mayan heartland that has been so brutally treated by our country. The report starts off with a mistake: that 1,300 people were infected with venereal diseases; it was over two thousand.

In the late 1940s, a team of American researchers conducted a disturbing experiment in Central America. They deliberately infected 1,300 Guatemalan people-- prisoners, sex workers, and soldiers-- with sexually transmitted diseases. Only 700 of them received treatment.

The subjects in the study did not give informed consent. In fact, they didn’t even know they were being infected.

When the Guatemalan study came to light last year, President Obama apologized on behalf of the United States. He also asked a Presidential Commission to investigate if safeguards are in place to make sure such unethical experiments could not be repeated.

On Thursday the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its findings.

“It was bad science, and it was bad ethics,” says Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the commission. “The commission is confident that what happened in Guatemala in the 1940s could not happen today.”

Gutmann says that today there are measures in place to protect human subjects from unethical treatment. For example, volunteers must give informed consent, and institutional review boards oversee the ethics of research projects.

But the commission couldn’t tell how well these rules were followed in every study. Gutmann says when it comes to federally funded research, there needs to be more transparency and accountability.

When the bioethics commission asked the government to submit information on studies it had funded last year, some departments struggled.

“The Pentagon for example required more than seven months to prepare information on specific studies supported by the Department of Defense,” says Gutmann. “They did not have a central database to which they could refer, and they told us that it was very difficult for them to gather all the information that we requested.”

In its new report, the presidential commission recommends the government set up a website with information about the human subject studies it funds.

Another issue raised in the report is what to do when volunteers are injured or otherwise harmed in the course of research.

Larry Gostin is a bioethicist at Georgetown University who was not on the commission. He says compensation is a real issue.

“You have to remember that human subject research is just that-- it’s a medical experiment,” he says.

The commission recommends that the federal government develop a clear policy to compensate participants who are harmed.

Gostin supports that recommendation. He points out that most developed countries have such policies.
“The United States is behind the curve on compensation,” he says.

The Guatemalan citizens who were experimented on without their knowledge never received compensation. Five of those Guatemalans who are still alive are suing the U.S. government.

Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth, says that before filing the lawsuit in March he reached out to the government and asked for a compensation for his clients. He says he has yet to receive a response.

The presidential commission did not address the issue of whether the Guatemalans who were experimented on in the 1940s should be compensated.

The report didn't address the question of what would Mitt do. Or Newt. The news report below is pretty horrifying: