US Government Used Humans In Guatemala As Guinea Pigs

This is a few days old, but deserves a place.

From Dscriber

Susan Reverby, a women's studies professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has uncovered a dark moment in recent American history. In their zeal to learn more about sexually-transmitted diseases, medical researchers working for the U.S. government in the late 1940s used prostitutes and shots to infect hundreds of people from Guatemala with gonorrhea and syphilis. Moreover, officials then encouraged the infected to pass their diseases on. The tests, co-sponsored by agencies meant to protect people, including the U.S. Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Organization, and Guatemala's government, were conducted on 696 male and female subjects in a national mental hospital. Researchers wanted to know whether penicillin was a good enough antibiotic to prevent infections, according to Reverby in her report (pdf).

It was not clear whether the subjects of the study were given treatment afterwords.

But today U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and U.S. Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are saying they are sorry...