The world was rightly shocked when it learned about the medical experiments which the Nazis undertook during that terrible regime - notably, by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. The reverberations of those experiments continue as some medical ethicists continue todebate whether those experiments which did yield medical knowledge, and even benefits, ought to be used given the criminal activity which saw their discovery.
How shocking to learn today that as far back as between 1946 to 1948 the USA engaged in Nazi-like experiments - not on its own people, but Guatemalans, mainly mental patients, prison inmates and soldiers. The New York Times reports:
"From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
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."
And:
"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".
How shocking to learn today that as far back as between 1946 to 1948 the USA engaged in Nazi-like experiments - not on its own people, but Guatemalans, mainly mental patients, prison inmates and soldiers. The New York Times reports:
"From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
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."
And:
"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".
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