GUATEMALAN VICTIMS OF SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT SUE U.S. HEALTH OFFICIALS

By Erica Laster                                                                                                                    Impunity Watch Reporter, North America

MIAMI, United States – Victims of United States syphilis experiments in Guatemala have filed a class action law suit to recover for their resulting illness and infections from 1946 to 1948.  The lawsuit alleges that U.S. public health officials violated both national and international laws by conducting syphilis experiments on prison inmates, orphans and mentally ill citizens of Guatemala.   All of the experiments were funded by the National Institute of Health.

U.S. officials infected Guatemalan prisoners, orphan children and mental health patients with syphilis.  Photo courtesy of CNN.
U.S. officials infected Guatemalan prisoners, orphan children and mental health patients with syphilis. Photo courtesy of CNN.

Filed by victims or direct heirs, the lawsuit claims that the illegal testing was part of a larger scheme to continue the syphilis experiments previously performed on African Americans in the state of Alabama from 1942-1972.  The complaint alleges that “This decision to move to Guatemala was part of a deliberate plan to continue the Tuskegee testing offshore, where it would not be subject to the same level of oversight as in the United States.”

The Tuskegee experiments were a notorious study which involved the medical testing and deliberate failure to inform 400 African American men of their syphilis infection.  Under the guise of receiving medical care for “bad blood,” these poor and uneducated men were promised free meals and burial expenses if they allowed the government to autopsy their bodies after their deaths.

Susan M. Reverby, a writer and professor at Wellesley College began researching for her follow up book on the syphilis experiments, “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy,” when she uncovered the Guatemalan experiments.  

Reverby immediately alerted the federal government of her findings, despite the usual practice of academics of keeping the content of their work private before publication.  A recent article published in the Journal of Policy History, Reverby states that “Public Health Service researchers did, in fact, deliberately infect poor and vulnerable men and women with syphilis in order to study the disease.”  She further claims that “The mistake of the myth is to set that story in Alabama, when it took place further south, in Guatemala.”

Dr. John Cutler, former assistant surgeon general of the United States Public Health Service (PHS), was discovered to not only have been a researcher in Tuskegee, but the physician responsible for conducting the Guatemalan experiments.

The lawsuit indicates that American doctors along with “The medical team started with inmates in the national penitentiary, using American taxpayer money to hire prostitutes who tested positive for syphilis or gonorrhea to offer sexual services to inmates.”  Requiring an uninfected group to determine error for false positive received from various inmates, the doctors moved to performing blood work on children in orphanages.  Later, mental patients were tested and inoculated with the sexually transmitted disease.

The U.S. doctors convinced the institutions officials to participate using various methods of ‘payment’.  Some received supplies such as refrigerators, while other officials received difficult to obtain medications for diseases such as epilepsy and malaria. In some instances, individual subjects -prison inmates- received compensation in the form of cigarettes.  Inmates receiving prostitutes received women already infected with syphilis.

In October, President Barack Obama created a bioethics panel to look into the studies.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius both issued a public apology.  

The class action lawsuit currently contains 7 plaintiffs despite the 700 subjects that were allegedly victims of the syphilis experiments. 

For More Information Please Visit:

Huffington Post – U.S. Guatemala Syphilis Tests: Attorneys Seek Lawsuit For Thousands Of Victims – 8 March 2011

CNN – Guatemalans Sue U.S. Over Medical Experiments – 16 March 2011

Fox News – Secretly Infected with Syphilis, Guatemalan Victims May Sue U.S – 9 March 2011

The Root – The Guatemala Syphilis Experiments Tuskegee Roots – 2 October 2010

Author: Impunity Watch Archive