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Panel reveals new details of 1940's experiment - Yahoo! News
More evidence that government can be used for great evil
More evidence that government can be used for great evil
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Regardless, it seems like under both FDR and Truman big government was intentionally destroying people's lives.
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Regardless, it seems like under both FDR and Truman big government was intentionally destroying people's lives.
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nice attempt at recovery.
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues issued its assessment Monday as it prepares to send a report on the matter to U.S. President Barack Obama next month.
Report findings
The commission concluded that the scientists used no informed consent procedures and exposed and infected people who were too vulnerable to object, such as children, mental patients, prisoners and commercial sex workers. The commission said the researchers failed to act in accordance with "minimal respect of human rights" and that the work was sloppily done and ethically objectionable. Additionally, the commission said the investigators deliberately kept their actions secret from people in the trial as well as the U.S. and Guatemalan scientific communities. The commission found that more than 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in the medical experiments. The research took place in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948. The study aimed to test the effectiveness of penicillin, which then was a relatively new treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Guatemala's reaction
Last year, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom described the 1940's study as a crime against humanity. President Obama also offered his apologies for the study. In a joint statement, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius expressed outrage that such research could have been conducted under the guise of public health. Results were never published. The study was funded by a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Details of the study were discovered in the papers of the late Dr. John Cutler, a U.S. public health investigator who helped conduct the research. Cutler also was later involved in similar experiments on African-American men at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In that study, some of the men were infected with syphilis but were never treated. Professor Susan Reverby at Wellesley College in the northeastern state of Massachusetts uncovered the Guatemala study while conducting research into the Tuskegee experiments.
Source
Regardless, it seems like under both FDR and Truman big government was intentionally destroying people's lives.
Not a good track record for the left or Democrats here.
The extent of US medical experiments in Guatemala on STDs during the 1940s is greater than previously thought, health authorities have told the BBC. The number of infected people could be as high as 2,500, says the president of the Medical Association of Guatemala. According to a US report released on Monday, 1,300 Guatemalans were infected without their knowledge to study the effects of penicillin. US scientists knew they were violating ethical rules, the report found.
There is also enough evidence to conclude there was collaboration between US and Guatemalan authorities at the time of the tests, Carlos Mejia, a member of the commission established by the Guatemalan government to investigate the experiments, told BBC Mundo. At least nine Guatemalan doctors were involved in these experiments, he said. Eight of them have already died, but authorities still do not know the whereabouts of a ninth, who would now be over 90 years old, he added. The commission's final report is due in October. Many of the same US government scientists who carried out the Guatemalan tests had sought consent from participants in an earlier study in the US.
'Nazi-like'
The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues had said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in all the research that took place between 1946 and 1948, with a view to applying the results on US troops stationed around the world. Of these, some 1,300 prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea or another sexually transmitted disease, chancroid. Concentrations of bacteria were injected into the eyes, the central nervous system and male genitals. Mr Mejia says this was behaviour very similar to that of the scientists in Nazi Germany. "It took place in the context in which they [the United States] were judging the German doctors who had been experimenting with typhus and malaria on prisoners of war. The Nazis used Poles, Russians and Jews, while the Americans made almost the same use of Guatemalans," he says.
Of the group of 1,300, only about 700 received some sort of treatment. According to documents the commission had studied, at least 83 of the 5,500 subjects had died by the end of 1953. The commission was unable to say whether any of those deaths were caused directly or indirectly by the deliberate infections. US President Barack Obama set up the commission when academic research carried out on the experiments by US government scientists first came to light last year. He also apologised to his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, saying the acts ran contrary to American values. Earlier this year, a group of Guatemalans who were involved in the study announced they were suing the US government over the affair.
BBC News - Guatemala STD tests 'may have infected 2,500'
Besides don't you find it odd progressives keep on bringing up FDR?
That was only 70 years ago and communists and the Japanese were thrown in prison for no reason - well the Japanese were at least....
Oh yeah I forgot the guy they keep mentioning as their hero only took people from their families and put them in camps like sheep...
FDR approved programs in 1946? Wow!