Tuskegee Experiment

President Barack Obama issued a public apology to the country of Guatemala. The apology was delivered to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom and hundreds of Guatemalan citizens for research experiments that had been conducted by American health officials during the 1940s.

During the time period,The US health officials had claimed to be testing remedies for diseases on the Guatemalan control group. Instead, however, the medical officials were actually infecting sex trade workers with sexually transmitted diseases first before convincing them to have unprotected sex with prison inmates. The doctors later used penicillin on the patients in varying doses to test for the effectiveness of the drug against diseases.

Chief medical researcher for the experiment, Dr.John Cutler, had also played a key role in the Tuskegee experiment in the US, a similar drug effectiveness experiment that took place in Tuskegee, Alabama a few short years before. In the Tuskegee experiment, men with symptoms of fatigue as well as those already infected with syphilis came forward for expected treatment. The men were all African-American and were baited with promises of 

“special medical treatment” that included free medical exams, free meals, and free burial. 

Tuskegee experiment continued until 1972, nearly thirty years after it had been publicly published and announced that penicillin was the new standard treatment for syphilis. Those participating in the Tuskegee experiment who weren’t previously aware of having the disease were never told. They were also never treated for the sometimes fatal disease.

The US has since monetarily compensated surviving family members of the Tuskegee experiment.

President Barrack Obama offered “profound apologies” while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the act against Guatemala, “reprehensible”.