And in her was found the blood
of the prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth. (Revelations
18:24)
NOTE:
From 1946 to 1948 U.S.
researchers in Guatemala
used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and
Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in
order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating sexually transmitted
diseases. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made
from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces
that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal
punctures." Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (INCLUDING ORPHAN CHILDREN ). The study was 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 team was led
by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose
to do the study in Guatemala
because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. The Guatemalan
study, which was never published, came to light in 2010 after Wellesley College
Professor Susan Reverby stumbled upon archived documents outlining the experiments.
Professor Susan Reverby
FIRST READ:
Remembering Tuskegee: Syphilis
Study Still Provokes Disbelief, Sadness
TUSKEGEE Part II in Africa: HIV Vaccine trials on Ugandan guinea pigs: 250 Ugandan women for vaginal ring anti-HIV study
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2012/07/tuskegee-part-ii-in-africa-hiv-vaccine.html
THE
DRUG EPIDEMIC, VIRUSES,
EBOLA, AND AIDS
[IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK!]
http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000081.htm
UNETHICAL MEDICAL RESEARCH IN
AFRICA Funded or Assisted by US-Based Institutions and/or US Government
NON-CONSENSUAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA THE OUTSOURCING OF TUSKEGEE Part II
Revisiting the Guatemala syphilis experiments with Susan Reverby
http://primr.blogspot.com/2011/09/revisiting-guatemala-syphilis.html
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
It’s almost the
one-year anniversary of the United
States’ formal apology to Guatemala for the experiments carried out during
the 1940s syphilis inoculation project co-sponsored by the US Public Health
Service (PHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Pan American Health
Sanitary Bureau, and the Guatemalan government.
Featured yesterday on Boston’s
local NPR station, WBUR, PRIM&R member and Wellesley College
professor Susan Reverby spoke about being the first to uncover the truth about
this project. Listen
to her podcast, ‘Ethically Impossible:’ Revisiting the Guatemalan
Syphilis Experiments, in which she reviews the Presidential Commission’s
recent findings.
Susan will be delivering the inaugural Pillars of PRIM&R lecture, "Escaping Melodramas: On Telling the Histories of the PHS Studies in Tuskegee and Guatemala," at the 2011 Advanced Ethical Research Conference, which will be held December 2-4, 2011, in National Harbor, MD
Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebelius apologize for Guatemalan syphilis experiment
Oct 1st, 2010 | By Christina England | Category: Top Stories
Information on the experiment was discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. Reverby says the “syphilis inoculation project” was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government.
Syphilis is a terrible painful and life threatening disease , it is caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidum, and often doesn’t cause any symptoms in its early stages. If left untreated, it can progress to affect the entire body. Syphilis typically has three stages, and there can be different symptoms in each. This disease was given to these men deliberately.
The USA Today noted (http://content.usatoday.com/communities…) U.S. doctors in 1940s inoculated Guatemalan patients with STDs without their consent. According to the article, this is what Susan wrote in her document concerning the experiments:
“The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it on to the prisoners … and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded when the ‘normal exposure’ produced little disease or in a few cases through spinal punctures.”
“Signs and Symptoms of Syphilis for Men
(http://menshealth.about.com/od/sexual…)
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by Treponema pallidum – a specific type of bacteria called a spirochete. Syphilisis characterized by four stages: primary, secondary, latent, and tertiary.
After becoming infected with syphilis, there is an incubation period between of 9 to 90 days (the average being around 21 days) before the first signs and symptoms of the disease appear. Each stage of syphilis has characteristic signs and symptoms but any particular sign or symptom of may or may not be present.
Signs and Symptoms of Primary Syphilis
The primary stage of syphilis typically begins with a sore (called a “chancre”) on the skin that initially exposed to the infection — usually the genitals, rectum or mouth. The sore has been described as feeling like a button: firm, round, usually measuring half-an-inch across, and not tender to the touch. Swelling of the lymph nodes in the groin may occur, but the nodes are not usually tender either.Infected individuals do not usually feel ill in the primary stage of syphilis, and the chancre heals spontaneously after 4 to 6 weeks. This is a problem because the syphilis has not gone away. Syphilis continues to spread throughout the body.
Signs and Symptoms of Secondary Syphilis
From the primary stage the disease moves into the secondary stage of syphilis. Secondary syphilis can often occur several weeks after the chancre heals, once the bacteria have spread through the body. An individual may feel sick’ common symptoms include headache, achiness, loss of appetite and maybe rash.The rash in secondary syphilis is usually reddish-brown in color, not itchy and widespread. However, the appearance of the rash’s individual lesions can vary dramatically: they may be flat or raised; they may or may not be scaly; and there may or may not be pustules present. It is partially do to the variability of this rash that led to syphilis being called “the great imitator,” because it can resemble many other conditions. The rash can last for a few weeks or months.
Other symptoms of secondary syphilis include sores in the mouth, nose, throat, and on the genitals or folds of the skin. Lymph node swelling is common and patchy hair loss can occur. All the signs and symptoms of the second stage of syphilis will disappear without treatment in 3 weeks to 9 months, but the infection will still be present in the body.
Signs and Symptoms of Latent Syphilis
The latent stage of syphilis, which occurs after the symptoms of secondary syphilis have disappeared, can last from a few year to up to 50 years! There are no symptoms in this stage, and after about 2 years an infected man may cease to be contagious. However, a man in the latent stage of syphilis is still infected and the disease can be diagnosed by a blood test. During the latent stage, a pregnant woman can transmit syphilis to her fetus.Signs and Symptoms of Tertiary Syphilis
The final stage of syphilis, which occurs in about one third of those who are not treated, is known as the tertiary stage. Many organs may be affected. Common symptoms include fever; painful, non-healing skin ulcers; bone pain; liver disease; and anemia. Tertiary syphilis can also affect the nervous system (resulting in the loss of mental functioning) and the aorta (resulting in heart disease).”This is what the USA government had to offer Guatemala citizens in the way of an apology – outlined in the (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2010/10/us_apologizes…) Washington Post:
“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was 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. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices. The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the United States, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala. The study is a sad reminder that adequate human subject safeguards did not exist a half-century ago.
Today, the regulations that govern U.S.-funded human medical research prohibit these kinds of appalling violations. The United States is unwavering in our commitment to ensure that all human medical studies conducted today meet exacting U.S. and international legal and ethical standards. In the spirit of this commitment to ethical research, we are launching a thorough investigation into the specifics of this case from 1946. In addition, through the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues we are also convening a body of international experts to review and report on the most effective methods to ensure that all human medical research conducted around the globe today meets rigorous ethical standards.
The people of Guatemala are our close friends and neighbors in the Americas. Our countries partner together on a range of issues, and our people are bound together by shared values, commerce, and by the many Guatemalan Americans who enrich our country. As we move forward to better understand this appalling event, we reaffirm the importance of our relationship with Guatemala, and our respect for the Guatemalan people, as well as our commitment to the highest standards of ethics in medical research.”
U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: October 1, 2010
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 apologized 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 apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.
His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee.
President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Mrs. Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.” His government said it would cooperate with the American investigation and do its own.
The experiments are “a dark chapter in the history of medicine,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Modern rules for federally financed research “absolutely prohibit” infecting people without their informed consent, Dr. Collins said.
Professor Reverby presented her findings about the Guatemalan experiments at a conference in January, but nobody took notice, she said in a telephone interview 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.
In the 1940s, Professor Reverby said, the United States Public Health Service “was deeply interested in whether penicillin could be used to prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection, whether better blood tests for the disease could be established, what dosages of penicillin actually cured infection, and to understand the process of re-infection after cures.”
It had difficulties growing syphilis in the laboratory, and its tests on rabbits and chimpanzees told it little about how penicillin worked in humans.
In 1944, it injected prison “volunteers” at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana with lab-grown gonorrhea, but found it hard to infect people that way.
In 1946, Dr. Cutler was asked to lead the Guatemala mission, which ended two years later, partly because of medical “gossip” about the work, Professor Reverby said, and partly because he was using so much penicillin, which was costly and in short supply.
Dr. Cutler would later join the study in Tuskegee, Ala., which had begun relatively innocuously in 1932 as an observation of how syphilis progressed in black male sharecroppers. In 1972, it was revealed that, even when early antibiotics were invented, doctors hid that fact from the men in order to keep studying them. Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, defended the Tuskegee experiment in a 1993 documentary.
Deception was also used in Guatemala, Professor Reverby said. Dr. Thomas Parran, the former surgeon general who oversaw the start of Tuskegee, acknowledged that the Guatemala work could not be done domestically, and details were hidden from Guatemalan officials.
Professor Reverby said she found some of Dr. Cutler’s papers at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until 1985, while she was researching Dr. Parran.
“I’m sifting through them, and I find ‘Guatemala ... inoculation ...’ and I think ‘What the heck is this?’ And then it was ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.’ My partner was with me, and I told him, ‘You aren’t going to believe this.’ ”
Fernando de la Cerda, minister counselor at the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, said that Mrs. Clinton apologized to President Colom in her Thursday phone call. “We thank the United States for its transparency in telling us the facts,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of reparations for survivors or descendants, Mr. de la Cerda said that was still unclear.
The public response on the Web sites of Guatemalan news outlets was furious. One commenter, Cesar Duran, on the site of Prensa Libre wrote: “APOLOGIES ... please ... this is what has come to light, but what is still hidden? They should pay an indemnity to the state of Guatemala, not just apologize.”
Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago’s medical school, said he was stunned. “This is shocking,” Dr. Siegler said. “This is much worse than Tuskegee — at least those men were infected by natural means.”
He added: “It’s ironic — no, it’s worse than that, it’s appalling — that, at the same time as the United States was prosecuting Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, the U.S. government was supporting research that placed human subjects at enormous risk.”
The Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors who experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners led to a code of ethics, though it had no force of law. In the 1964 Helsinki Declaration, the medical associations of many countries adopted a code.
The Tuskegee scandal and the hearings into it conducted by Senator Edward M. Kennedy became the basis for the 1981 American laws governing research on human subjects, Dr. Siegler said.
It was preceded by other domestic scandals. From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected retarded children with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors.
Remembering Tuskegee: Syphilis
Study Still Provokes Disbelief, Sadness
July 25, 2002 --Thirty years ago today, the Washington
Evening Star newspaper ran this headline on its front page: "Syphilis
Patients Died Untreated." With those words, one of America's most
notorious medical studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, became public.
"For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, not given proper treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects," Associated Press reporter Jean Heller wrote on July 25, 1972. "The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body."
The next morning, every major U.S. newspaper was running Heller's story. For Morning Edition, NPR's Alex Chadwick reports on how the Tuskegee experiment was discovered after 40 years of silence.
The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.
For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance.
At the start of the study, there was no proven treatment for syphilis. But even after penicillin became a standard cure for the disease in 1947, the medicine was withheld from the men. The Tuskegee scientists wanted to continue to study how the disease spreads and kills. The experiment lasted four decades, until public health workers leaked the story to the media.
By then, dozens of the men had died, and many wives and children had been infected. In 1973, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a class-action lawsuit. A $9 million settlement was divided among the study's participants. Free health care was given to the men who were still living, and to infected wives, widows and children.
But it wasn't until 1997 that the government formally apologized for the unethical study. President Clinton delivered the apology, saying what the government had done was deeply, profoundly and morally wrong:
"To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish.
"What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say, on behalf of the American people: what the United States government did was shameful. "And I am sorry."
