March 15, in Washington D.C., a class-action lawsuit was filed by seven Guatemalan plaintiffs on behalf of 700 prisoners, mental patients, and orphans against the US Department of Health and Human Services, according to Fox News.
The case, filed in the U.S. federal court, is a product of medical experiments led in the 1940’s by John C. Cutler, the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service, in collaboration with the top venereal disease expert in Guatemala.
Piper Hendricks, one of the lawyers for the prosecution, had said she hoped to reach an agreement in order to avoid litigation and trial, according to CNN.
The lawsuit does not specify the amount of damages for “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” which it seeks, according to AOL News.
However, according to BBC, lawyers said that the Obama administration had not responded to the request for a compensation settlement.
The experiments were to test if penicillin could prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and to test what doses of penicillin could cure syphilis.
According to The New York Times, between 1946 and 1948, American doctors under Cutler’s orders purposely infected close to 700 Guatemalans — without their consent or knowledge — with syphilis and gonorrhea. According to CNN the subjects were prisoners, mental patients, and children at an orphanage. Institutions housing the subjects gave consent, not the subjects themselves.
American tax dollars (through the National Institutes of Health) paid for prostitutes infected with syphilis and/or gonorrhea to engage in sexual activity with male prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala, reports The New York Times.
If the prostitutes failed to infect the men, doctors would either pour the bacteria onto scrapes made on the victim’s penises, faces, or arms, or in some cases the bacteria would be injected by spinal puncture, according to The New York Times.
According to The New York Times, the study was brought to light in September, 2010, by Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College. Reverby found unpublished records in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh, and wrote a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.
Guatemala’s president Álvaro Colom first learned of the experiments on September 30, 2010 in a phone call from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. He called the experiments “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.”
“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” said Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a public apology.
According to MSNBC, this case brings up many concerns including U.S. relations with Guatemala, and ethics in medical research. However, according to MSNBC, in the 1940’s, there were no formalized regulations regarding protection of human studies.
Today, top health officials insist the current rules governing federally financed research would prohibit such experiments.
They require that subjects are aware of the risks, give their informed consent, and be approved by the institutional review boards.
“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,” said Clinton and Sebelius in a joint statement in the same public apology. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”