Linda Villarosa: The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment's Tuskegee Roots
[Linda Villarosa directs the journalism program at City College in New York and is a regular contributor to The Root.]
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for a diabolical human experiment conducted in Central America 64 years ago and engineered by the U.S. government. From 1946 to 1948, scientists deliberately infected Guatemalan research subjects with syphilis to study how well penicillin worked.
Sound familiar?
It should. This experiment is eerily similar to the notorious 40-year Tuskegee Study that used African-American men as human lab rats. Beginning in the 1930s in Macon County, Ala., the U.S. government left more than 400 syphilis-infected black men untreated to study the course of the disease. The men, who suffered from the often debilitating, sometimes deadly late-stage form of the sexually transmitted disease, thought they were getting free medical care for "bad blood." They were never told that they were actually subjects being followed in a long-term, "no treatment" study that finally ended in 1972. The men, poor and uneducated, were also given free meals and promised money for burials if they allowed their bodies to be autopsied after they died....
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On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for a diabolical human experiment conducted in Central America 64 years ago and engineered by the U.S. government. From 1946 to 1948, scientists deliberately infected Guatemalan research subjects with syphilis to study how well penicillin worked.
Sound familiar?
It should. This experiment is eerily similar to the notorious 40-year Tuskegee Study that used African-American men as human lab rats. Beginning in the 1930s in Macon County, Ala., the U.S. government left more than 400 syphilis-infected black men untreated to study the course of the disease. The men, who suffered from the often debilitating, sometimes deadly late-stage form of the sexually transmitted disease, thought they were getting free medical care for "bad blood." They were never told that they were actually subjects being followed in a long-term, "no treatment" study that finally ended in 1972. The men, poor and uneducated, were also given free meals and promised money for burials if they allowed their bodies to be autopsied after they died....