US infected Guatemalans with syphilis in 1940s, Wellesley professor finds
US infected Guatemalans with syphilis in 1940s - A college professor has discovered that the US govt in the 1940s infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases in an experiment conducted without the knowledge of the 1,500 men and women - some of them patients in a mental hospital.
BBC: US medical "tests" in Guatemala crime against humanity
MSN: Horrific medical tests of past raise concerns for today. As more research moves outside U.S., are we still exploiting the poor? The astounding revelation that U.S. medical researchers intentionally gave Guatemalans gonorrhea and syphilis more than 60 years ago is so horrifying that we want to believe that what happened then could never happen today. We want to believe that doctors are treating the poor, vulnerable and those outside the U.S. with more care and respect. But are they? Have we really learned what we should have from the travesty of past medical experiments? In recent years, there has been a steady shift of clinical research from testing in the U.S. and other developed nations to the developing world. A report from the United States Department of Health and Human Services noted that roughly 80 percent of drug approvals in 2008 were based in part on data from outside the U.S. Eight percent of drugs approved for use in the U.S. were only tested using subjects in foreign nations. As more testing is outsourced to other nations, there is a very real moral worry that we are still exploiting the poor to serve as guinea pigs so we can improve our medical care.