1946: the year the United States intentionally infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). 1,500: the number of subjects involved. 700: the estimated number of Guatemalans who contracted the disease. 64: the number of years it took for this ethical violation to be uncovered.

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the United States intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients, prostitutes, and soldiers with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. The study was conducted from 1946-1948 as part of an experiment to study the use of penicillin after unprotected sex.

HHS outlined the ethical violations involved as “1) use of study subjects who were mem-bers of highly vulnerable populations, 2) research without valid informed consent, and 3) decep-tions in conducting experiments.”

Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, unexpectedly un-covered the information about this project while looking through documents from a similar study that took place in Tuskegee, Alabama. In this study, the U.S. Public Health Service watched, but did not treat, hundreds of African American men with late stage syphilis for 40 years from 1932-1972.

According to CNN, instead of finding more information on the Tuskegee case, however, Reverby discovered an unpublished research report entitled “Experimental Studies on Human Inoculation with Syphilis, Gonorrhea and Chancroid,” which described the experimental studies done in Guatemala.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Reverby explained her find-ings.

“They went to Guatemala because prostitution was legal in Guatemala, and it was legal to bring a prostitute in for sexual services into the prisons,” she said. “When they couldn’t create enough infection by allowing the prostitutes in, that’s when they started to do inoculations.”

“It was a mindset at the time — especially for those in the medical community who had this god complex and felt the answers they would get out of it were worth the costs,” Chair of the Biology Department Melanie Lee-Brown said.

“Even more amazing was that they knew this was on an ethical edge,” Susan Reverby writes in the Bioethics Forum. “Deception was seen as necessary.”

The real question is not whether this was an unethical act done by our government, but whether this incident reflects a larger trend in the United States’ relations with other foreign gov-ernments.

“It’s a reprehensible act by the government and it’s part of a long term pattern of medical experiments performed on people identified as the least powerful, Guatemala fitting into that pat-tern,” Alvis Dunn, assistant professor of history, said.

“I don’t believe this issue is just something in history, a matter of the past, problems that we are not going to do anymore,” said Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Joe Cole. “Un-fortunately, I think we need to be quite vigilant (in these matters).”

Lee-Brown reflected on the historical backdrop of the controversial incident.

“Science was growing rapidly (at the time of the study),” Lee-Brown said. “We were get-ting a whole lot of information. We progressed faster than we had a chance to step back and look at it and say ‘wait a minute, what are we doing, how are we doing this, and who do we need to protect.'”

According to a press release by HHS, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said in a joint statement, “We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health.”

They went on to say that an investigation of the specifics of this case is upcoming. A body of international experts on bioethical issues will be composed to ensure that “all human medical research conducted around the globe today meets rigorous ethical standards.”

According to Democracy Now!, the Guatemalan government is also looking into the in-cident to help uncover the level of internal government involvement, and they are determined to make sure this kind of unethical medical practice does not occur again.

“If it can be something we learn from, and make institutional changes, and have some more safeguards against, that would be a good result,” said Cole. “It wouldn’t make up what happened to this people. It is just a tragedy.”