US doctors knew STD research on prisoners broke ethical codes

US GOVERNMENT researchers knew they were violating ethical standards by infecting Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s, according to a presidential commission.

US-funded research in Guatemala did not treat its participants as human beings, failing to even inform them they were taking part in research, the commission said.

The US apologised last year for the experiment, which was meant to test the drug penicillin, after it was uncovered decades later by a college professor.

President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues investigated the experiment and discussed its key findings. A final report is due in December.

“They should shock the conscience not in spite of their medical context, but precisely because of it,” said commission chairwoman Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania.

“The people who were in the know did want to keep it secret, because if it would become more widely known, it would become the subject of public criticism,” she said.

The probe has consequences for US diplomacy and will affect the ethical discussion surrounding how new drugs are tested on patients, as manufacturers increasingly conduct clinical trials abroad.

Guatemala condemned the tests by the US Public Health Service (PHS) as a crime against humanity and said last year it would consider taking the case to an international court. Victims of the study are suing the US government.

PHS officer Dr John Cutler, a junior scientist at the time, led the research from 1946 to 1948.

Some 1,300 people were infected with venereal disease, more than half with syphilis. They included inmates exposed to infected prostitutes brought into jails and male and female patients in a mental hospital. Some subjects had bacteria poured on scrapes made on their genitals, arms or faces.

In one archived record, Cutler noted that one of the mentally ill women he had infected with syphilis appeared to be dying. Still, the woman remained a study subject and was further infected with STDs before she died.

“They thought: ‘We’re in a war against disease and in war soldiers die,’ ” said Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby, who uncovered the records of the experiment.

Cutler also participated in a 1943 gonorrhoea experiment in the high-security prison, Terre Haute, where inmates were infected but were informed of the study and asked to give consent. Until his death in 2003, Cutler remained unapologetic about his work.