Guatemala Prisoners Infected With Syphilis - Tax Dollars at Work 1940's Style

Recently unearthed news reports indicate that in the 1940's the US government knowingly infected prisoners from Guatemala with syphilis, in order to study the effects of penicillin.

"U.S. officials have apologized for shockingly immoral experiments done on hundreds of Guatemalans in the 1940s, in an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating syphilis.

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalan prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers, as part of the experiment. In some instances, syphilis-infected prostitutes were paid to sleep with prisoners, as part of the testing.

Susan Reverby is responsible for publicly exposing the details of this medical testing. A medical historian, professor at Wellesley College and author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy, Reverby was doing research about the Tuskegee study (in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated and observed for decades) when she came across the unpublished work of Dr. John C. Cutler, who led the experiment in Guatemala. Cutler also had an important role in the Tuskegee study. Reverby says, "As with Tuskegee, [the Guatemalan syphilis experiment's] lessons ended up being about morality."

These findings and admissions are astonishing on many levels.

These experiments don't put the actions of the US federal government very far from the perverse and sadistic doings of Nazi "Angel of Death" doctor Joseph Mengele, who was also rather well known for his "scientific" experiments on live human beings.

Does anyone else have the feeling that there are certain actions being taken by the federal government today (think War on Terror, Patriot Act, etc.) that we'll only find out about 50 years from now and for which the federal government will belatedly apologize for and promise that it will never do that exact same thing ever again.

The amazing thing about the federal government is that it can take taxpayer money and be involved in scandal after scandal in year after year, and yet very few of us ever gives much if any thought to reigning in its influence as a consequence.

What private company would be able to survive a scandal similar to this one in its mendacity and evilness, even 60 years after the original act was perpetrated? Me thinks none.

One last thing is that something tells me that the entire work history of that creep (Dr. Cutler) who had his hands in at least two scandals needs to be fully studied in order to find any other "experiments" he might have undertaken on behalf of the federal government.