America faces global outrage after it apologised for deliberately infecting patients in a mental hospital with STDs in science experiments.
Government officials provided prostitutes to patients in the Guatamalen institute from 1946 to 1948 to to test if the relatively new drug penicillin could prevent them catching STDs.
None of the tests proved successful and the details were hidden in medial archives for decades.
Sorry: President Barack Obama apologised after it emerged that the U.S. deliberately infected mental patients with STDs
But medical historian Susan Reverby from Wellesley College in Massachusetts unearthed the shocking details of the tests while researching archives in Pennsylvania.
Around 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis and gonorrhea during the research. If the patients failed to contract the illnesses they were deliberately inoculated.
President Barack Obama rang Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom, to apologize when he became aware of the tests on Friday. Hilary Clinton had called to apologize the night before.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said: 'Obviously this is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible. It's tragic and the U.S. by all means apologizes to all those who were impacted.'
Arturo Valenzuela, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said that in her conversation with the Guatemalan president, Clinton expressed 'her personal outrage and deep regret that such reprehensible research could occur'.
Guatemalan Embassy official Fernando de la Cerda said his country hadn't known anything about the experiment until Clinton called to apologise on Thursday night.
'We appreciate this gesture from the USA, acknowledging the mistake and apologising, he said. 'This must not affect the bilateral relationship.'
Miss Reverby made the discovery last year while combing the archived records of Dr.John Cutler, a government researcher involved in the infamous Tuskegee study that from 1932 to 1972 tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis without ever offering them treatment.
She found that Cutler also led the Guatemala project which is believed to have been on a much wider and more worrying scale.
In Tuskegee, scientists knew African-American sharecroppers had become infected with syphilis but withheld treatment to track the progression of the disease.
Guatemala: The country where hundreds of mentally ill patients were deliberately infected with STDs for medical research
But in Guatemala, prisoners, soldiers, and inmates in mental asylums were willfully infected, sometimes by using prostitutes provided by the scientists or sometimes by pouring the germs onto skin abrasions the researchers caused.
A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea through jail visits by prostitutes or, when that didn't infect enough people, by deliberately inoculating them. They were offered penicillin, but it wasn't clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated.
Miss Reverby revealed the disturbing find to health professionals at a conference in May. She later provided her findings to the government the next month resulting in Friday's apology and she has since posted them on her website.
Discovery: Susan Reverby found details of the STD tests after they had been hidden away for decades
She said: 'I was just completely blown away. I was floored.
'I expected to find something on Tuskegee. There was nothing. What he left behind were these records from the Guatemala study.
'That was all he left behind. Why he did this, I have no idea. Why would you leave this?'
Reverby said she did not publicise her findings sooner because no one was in immediate danger and because, unlike Tuskegee, most of the subjects were treated.
She added: 'It’s not like I could have stopped something that was happening now.'
Strict regulations today make clear that it is unethical to experiment on people without their consent, and require special steps for any work with such vulnerable populations as prisoners. But such regulations did not exist in the 1940s.
The U.S. government has ordered two independent investigations to uncover exactly what happened in Guatemala and to make sure current bioethics rules are adequate. They will be led by the prestigious Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Dr. Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist said: 'We've made some obvious moral progress.
'The sad legacy of past unethical experiments is that they still shape who it is that we can get to trust medical researchers.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1317062/US-apologises-scientists-infecting-mentally-ill-patients-STDs.html#ixzz1ip68kFaS
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