A commission investigating U.S. medical testing on unsuspecting Guatemalan subjects in the 1940s has reported that more than 1,300 people were intentionally infected with venereal diseases, and an estimated 83 died as treatment was withheld. The commission was established by President Obama after Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College, discovered archival documents exposing the project in 2010.
The resulting commission report, released last month, revealed that the experiments were led by U.S. doctor John Cutler, who was also implicated in the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, ended in 1972, in which hundreds of African Americans with syphilis were similarly denied treatment.
The Guatemala study, which purportedly attempted to discover if penicillin could treat sexually transmitted diseases, was conducted from 1946 to 1948. The experiments read like horrors from Nazi Germany, including women injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a woman deliberately infected with gonorrhea in her eyes, and more. Guatemalan government officials have said that they will also investigate the experiments.
