U.S. Doctors Secretly Infected Guatemalans with Syphilis (Video)

Democracy Now reports that approximately 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes and mental patients were infected by U.S. doctors in the 1940s as part of a study into the effects of penicillin. The news organization reported that it remains unclear if the patients were ever cured of the diseases or given treatment.

President Obama has apologized to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom since learning of the U.S. experiments. And Colom has called the experiments a “crime against humanity.”

Democracy Now spoke with Susan Reverby, the medical historian who discovered the Guatemela study. Reverby is a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her article on the Guatemala study will be published in the January edition of Journal of Policy History. She is also an expert on the Tuskegee experiments, and author of the book “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.” On Democracy Now, she explores the dark history of medical experimentation from the Nazis to Tuskegee to Puerto Rico.