The U.S. Doctor Who Infected 1,300 Guatemalan Patients With STDs
This is truly hideous, but people need to know what happened:
The U.S. Doctor Who Infected 1,300 Guatemalan Patients With STDs
Sarah Zhang
4/08/15 1:00pm
In the 1940s, a young American doctor went to Guatemala to do medical experiments. He was funded by the venerable U.S. National Institutes of Health, but he did not make anyone healthy. Instead, he deliberately exposed 1,300 people to sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr. John C. Cutler was no mad scientist. His experiments exposing prostitutes, prisoners and asylum inmates to STDs were carried out under the Public Health Service. They are flagrantly unethical by modern standards, but that they were deemed acceptable at the time—and perhaps that’s the most horrifying part of all.
Last week, 800 Guatemalans filed a class-action lawsuit for $1 billion against Johns Hopkins University for its role in the STD experiments. Why now, 70 years later? Cutler never published the results of his experiments, which were frankly shoddy science. And thus the experiments were simply forgotten until 2010, when Wellesley professor Susan M. Reverby stumbled across Cutler’s paper while researching the Tuskegee experiments in Alabama. (Cutler also worked on these experiments, where hundreds of African-Americans infected with syphilis were not given treatment). The Obama administration issued an official apology then, but medical ethicists have since called for compensation for the Guatemalan victims.
The 1940s were a different time, of course. Sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis, loomed far larger in the public imagination than they do today. Even though scientists had proved that penicillin could cure syphilis by 1943, ways to prevent STDs were still lacking—a problem for soldiers just returning from WWII. That’s where Cutler came in.
More:
http://gizmodo.com/the-u-s-doctor-who-infected-1-300-guatemalan-patients-1696095744
Science:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/122837763
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Dr. John C. Cutler, during the Tuskeegee Experiment [/center]
