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U.S. Apologizes for Deliberately Infecting People with Syphilis

Susan Reverby, a Wellesley College medical historian, has exposed another dark chapter in the history of medicine - American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago.

This U.S. government-funded experiment or STD study which ran from 1946 to 1948 was conducted to test if penicillin could prevent infection with sexually transmitted diseases. Although strict regulations today does not allow experiment on people without their consent and require special steps for any work with such vulnerable populations as prisoners, there were no such strict regulations in the 1940s.

Reverby discovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee experiment for a recent book and uncovered the records of Dr. John Cutler, a prominent government scientist of the 1940s. She reported that there was a permission from Guatemalan officials to conduct the study but the experimental subjects were not informed. 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea either through jail visits by prostitutes or by deliberately vaccinating them. Penicillin was then offered to those infected but it wasn't clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated.

This revelation has prompted U.S. officials to apologize and create two independent investigations to uncover exactly what happened in Guatemala and will be led by Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The reprehensible research conducted in Guatemala came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades. The government researcher who led the work in Guatemala also was involved in the infamous Tuskegee experiment from 1932 to 1972 where scientists found 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis unknown to them but were offered no treatment.

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins also said that the experiment in Guatemala is just one of the 40 similar deliberate-infection studies conducted in the United States during that period.