by DANILO VALLADARES and AMANDA WILSON
U.S. troops march in Guatemala’s Independence Parade in 1942: From 1946 to 1948, American officials intentionally infected hundreds of Guatemalans with STDs, according to a new report. PHOTO/Bettmann/CORBIS/Week
The appalling experiments carried out by U.S. doctors in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 using 1,300 human subjects who were infected with sexually transmitted diseases highlighted the inadequacy of controls and safeguards in clinical testing in this Central American country – still a major problem today, according to experts.
“The trained human resources are not in place for oversight of research, and the standards and regulations are either flawed or are not met,” Dr. Luis López, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues set up by President Barack Obama to investigate the case, told IPS.
In Guatemala, medical research is regulated by a 2007 Health Ministry agreement on “standards for the regulation of clinical trials”, which is “very weak because it does not have the strength of legislation and fails to outline the intersectoral aspects that could be in play when it comes to experimentation with human subjects,” the expert added.
No such regulations existed in this country in the 1940s, when prisoners, military conscripts, sex workers, mental patients and orphans were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid purportedly to test penicillin in the shocking U.S.-run experiments.
But more than six decades later, controls “are still so weak that not all studies using human subjects in Guatemala reach the hands of the Health Ministry,” López said.
Various clinical ethics committees operate in universities, hospitals and other institutions in Guatemala. But it is the Health Ministry, through the Commission for the Evaluation of Clinical Trials, that ultimately grants permission for such testing.
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