2011年4月21日星期四

Documents: Guatemalan commends U.S. syphilis doctor (AP)

ATLANTA - the Guatemala U.S. physicians have also been summary of one of the more contrary to medical ethics that they had never carried out, a medical official Guatemalan rented as noble principal investigator and thanked profusely.

More than 60 years ago letter praising the Guatemalan official is among the thousands of documents published Tuesday on the doctor who led the study that have infected the Guatemalan prison inmates and the mentally ill with syphilis in the 1940s.

The discs released by the National Archives reveal new information on Guatemalan officials involvement in research, well that it is not clear if they were aware of all the details of what the doctors United States were.

The documents that belonged to researcher U.S. Public Health Service Dr John c. Cutler were formerly housed at the University of Pittsburgh but resides in the dark until a medical historian discovered their. The international press for its conclusion in October, when the Government of the United States recognized research had taken place, and apologized for it.

The President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called President Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, to apologize personally.

Embassy Guatemala official Fernando de la Cerda, said that his country had never known anything about the experience until Clinton made the call.

But indicated that just as the experience was buried by medical officials at the United States, it was also known and they apparently forgotten at the Guatemala.

Indeed, it was a Guatemalan, who first proposed the country as a framework for research. The idea comes from Dr. Juan Funes, Chief of the division of control of venereal diseases of the national health service of the Guatemala, who was assigned to a public health laboratory, in New York for a year Cutler wrote in a summary of the study.

1946-48, The Service of public health of the United States and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau has worked with several agencies of the Government of Guatemala to study - paid by the Government of the United States - involving a deliberately exposing subjects to sexually transmitted diseases.

Researchers attempted to infect about 700 prostitutes, prisoners and the mentally ill with syphilis. Approximately 770 subjects of tests, including soldiers, have been exposed to gonorrhea.

Patients were treated with penicillin. Among the objectives of the research was to see how well different doses of penicillin worked against various venereal diseases.

But Cutler records were not kept with other documents of the Government, and apparently its summaries of the works were never published in a medical journal.

Researchers American command were firm of research, and it is not clear if each involved Guatemalan official knew all the details of the work of U.S. physicians. The Director of the psychiatric hospital - who gave permission to his patients to be participants in the study - apparently did not know that they have granted the disease, said Susan Reverby, Wellesley College historian who discovered the records of the study.

But there is no record of any Guatemalan expressing ethical scruples with what they knew not.

Quite the contrary: Dr. Roberto Robles Chinchilla, Penetenciaria Guatemala Central medical administrator, wrote Cutler to "eternal gratitude" for "Gentleman and noble way in which you reduce the suffering" of prisoners of the penitentiary.

"You have really been a philanthropist," he wrote in December 1948, as Cutler was finishing the major part of his research there.

The perception of Philanthropy was understandable. Search U.S. money paid for a new laboratory in the national service of public health in the construction of Guatemela headquarters.

Asylum of crazy poorly equipped where much of the research of syphilis has been conducted, U.S. paid search for drugs antiepileptics-cruelly metal cups and plates, a new large refrigerator and even a projector of film for the entertainment of the residents.

Patients who participated were rewarded with cigarettes, not to mention the attention that they had already obtained not prior to the installation of lack of personnel and reconnaissance. Some were thus draws exuberant that they always tried to return to doctors of extra blood or other procedures, Cutler wrote.

But it is doubtful, that they understood the potential harms that they risked being infected. Some mentally ill did not even know their own name, he wrote.

Cutler, was later involved in the notorious Tuskegee study, another form of research in which black men in Alabama, who already had syphilis were followed by but not processed.

In 1990, Cutler donated a collection of approximately 12,000 pages of correspondence, reports, photographs and records of patients at the University of Pittsburgh. Cutler died in 2003.

The National Archives announced records in line with a press release. "It is another example of the commitment of the employees of the National Archives of transparency", Archivist of the United States David s. Ferriero said in a prepared statement.


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