USA Guatemala venereal disease tests in the 40s - nothing new

Now that's one heck of a headline. Trouble is, it's true.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton apologised to the Central American country just the other day for her country's intentional infection of some 700 unaware prisoners and mentally ill patients with syphillis and gonorrhea between 1946 and 1948, during the Harry S. Truman administration.

The joint statement from Mrs Clinton and Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: "Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices."

Syphillis can cause blindness, insanity and even death. Gonorrhea is a common cause of pelvic inflamatory disease in women, which can lead to infertility or ectopic pregnancy in women. In men, it can cause infertility and lead to death as well. Treatment for both lies in the early application of penicillin.

So how did the Gautemalans get these STDs? The US government -with the approval of the Guatemalan government of the time, it must be said- simply imported prostitutes known to be infected.

President Barak Obama has also apologised, when the bacteria hit the fan in the media. In his phone call to Guatemala President Colom, Obama reaffirmed the United States' unwavering commitment to ensure that all human medical studies conducted today meet exacting US and international legal and ethical standards.

These apologies come at a time when the US's officially secret documents become available to the public.

But the author of the study, Susan M. Reverby, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, has been studying the ethics of such experiments for over a decade. Her book, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy, tells of a similar experiment carried out on black people in the US from 1932 to 1972. (More on this and other such experiments. And there's a terrifying item on Wikipedia titled Human Experimentation in the United States.)

These experiments amount to much the same thing as the Nazis carried out on their concentration camp victims, about which the world rightly continues to be outraged. The USA was one of the prosecuting powers at the post WW2 Nuremberg Trials, (from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946 - ending about the same time as the Guatemala experiments began) together with the Soviet Union, France and Britain. Are we certain the other three never carried out any such experiments? We're not, are we?

Hipocrisy, I'd call it.

Guatemala is outraged. Much of the world is outraged. I even suspect there are those in the US who are outraged. Those who read a newspaper occasionally, anyway. At the time of writing there has been no mention of reparations of any kind. The US can easily afford to throw some money at Guatemala, it often does.

But outrage doesn't last. It comes back, though, when yet another 'undisclosed' incident  hits the headlines - like a distinct lack of weapons of mass destruction, for instance. (See? How long did your outrage last on that?)

Are we ready for more outrage stemming from the most arrogant country in present history?

(c) Alberto Bullrich 2010