American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture. If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.
“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.
The revelations were made public on Friday, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologised to the government of Guatemala and the survivors and descendants of those infected. They called the experiments “clearly unethical”.
“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,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
The unpublished Guatemala work of John C Cutler, the public health doctor who led the experiment, was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee.
Prez shocked
President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity”. His government said it would cooperate with the American investigation and do its own.
Professor Susan M Reverby presented her findings about the Guatemalan experiments at a conference in January, but nobody took notice, she said in a telephone interview on Friday.
In June, she sent a draft of an article she was preparing for the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy History to Dr David J Sencer, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control. He prodded the government to investigate.