African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic STD's ... - Blackherbals.com
African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic STD's ... - Blackherbals.com
African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic STD's ... - Blackherbals.com
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<strong>African</strong> <strong>Traditional</strong> <strong>Herbal</strong> <strong>Research</strong> <strong>Clinic</strong><br />
Volume 6, Issue 10 NEWSLETTER October 2011<br />
FEATURED ARTICLES<br />
U.S. INFECTED GUATEMALANS FOR STD TESTS<br />
By Rob Stein<br />
October 2, 2010<br />
Washington Post<br />
The United States revealed on Friday that the<br />
government conducted medical experiments in the<br />
1940s in which doctors infected soldiers, prisoners and<br />
mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other<br />
sexually transmitted diseases.<br />
The experiments, led by a federal doctor who helped<br />
conduct the famous Tuskegee syphilis study in<br />
Alabama, involved about 1,500 men and women who<br />
were unwittingly drafted into studies aimed at<br />
determining the effectiveness of penicillin.<br />
The tests, which were carried out between 1946 and<br />
1948, infected subjects by bringing them prostitutes<br />
who were either already infected or purposefully<br />
infected by the researchers and by using needles to<br />
open wounds that could be contaminated.<br />
"Although these events occurred more than 64 years<br />
ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research<br />
could have occurred under the guise of public health,"<br />
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health<br />
and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said<br />
in a joint statement apologizing for the experiments.<br />
"We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize<br />
to all the individuals who were affected by such<br />
abhorrent research practices."<br />
President Obama had been briefed about the revelations<br />
and called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom to<br />
"personally express that apology," White House<br />
spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "Obviously, this is<br />
shocking. It's tragic. It's reprehensible," Gibbs said.<br />
The Guatemalan government planned to investigate,<br />
saying it "deeply deplores that these experiments<br />
affected innocent people," according to a statement<br />
issued late in the day.<br />
In addition to exposing another episode of unethical<br />
medical experimentation, officials said the revelations<br />
were concerning because they could further discourage<br />
already often-suspicious minorities and others from<br />
participating in medical research. They also <strong>com</strong>e as U.S.<br />
drug <strong>com</strong>panies are increasingly going to poor, lesseducated<br />
countries to test new drugs and other therapies.<br />
"At a time when so much medical research is global, it<br />
behooves us to take account of what has been done in the<br />
past by American researchers in other countries," said<br />
Susan M. Reverby, a professor in the history of ideas and<br />
professor of women's and gender studies at Wellesley<br />
College in Massachusetts who discovered the<br />
experiments while investigating Tuskegee for a book.<br />
In Tuskegee, perhaps the most notorious medical<br />
experiment in U.S. history, hundreds of <strong>African</strong><br />
American men with late-stage syphilis was left untreated<br />
to study the disease between 1932 and 1972. In the<br />
Guatemala case, the subjects were treated, but it remains<br />
unclear whether they were treated adequately or what<br />
became of them.<br />
Reverby discovered the experiments while reading papers<br />
in the University of Pittsburgh's archives from John C.<br />
Cutler, a doctor with the federal government's Public<br />
Health Service who later participated in Tuskegee. He<br />
died in 2003.<br />
"I almost fell out of my chair when I started reading this,"<br />
Reverby said in a telephone interview. "Can you<br />
imagine I couldn't believe it."<br />
The studies were sponsored by the Public Health Service,<br />
the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American<br />
Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health<br />
Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and<br />
the Guatemalan government. The goal was to assess<br />
whether taking penicillin right after sex would prevent<br />
sexually transmitted infections.<br />
Cutler, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes and<br />
colleagues decided to study men in Guatemala City's<br />
Continued on page 9<br />
-8- <strong>Traditional</strong> <strong>African</strong> <strong>Clinic</strong> October 2011