http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101001/hl_yblog_upshot/u-s-apologizes-to-guatemalans-for-secret-std-experiments

U.S. scientific researchers infected hundreds of Guatemalan mental patients with sexually transmitted diseases from 1946 to 1948. They even encouraged many of them to pass the disease on to others.
However this prgramme had the approval of the Guatemalan government


The other programme was named
"Tuskegee experiment," studying 399 poor black men from Macon County, Ala., who had been diagnosed with syphilis but never informed of their condition. Federal scientists simply told the men they had "bad blood" and researchers compiled a four-decades-long study monitoring "untreated syphilis in the male Negro." Researchers never treated the illness over its usually fatal course, even after the simple remedy of penicillin was shown to be an effective syphilis treatment; participants received only free meals and medical exams, together with federal funding of their funeral expenses after they died. The study began in 1932, continuing right through to 1972, when it was exposed in media reports.

The upshot - donor agencies do not always mean well
and governments do not always act in the best interests of its won peopl

I do not condone this in anyway. It makes one wonder what else goes one that we do not know about.


Lets not forget that this was the 60s era and Medical Ethics is not as strong as it is now back then.

ElRazur:

I do not condone this in anyway. It makes one wonder what else goes one that we do not know about.


Lets not forget that this was the 60s era and Medical Ethics is not as strong as it is now back then.

maybe so, but this was less than 15 years after the horrors and outcry of the nazi experiments on prisoners

oyb:

maybe so, but this was less than 15 years after the horrors and outcry of the nazi experiments on prisoners

You may be right. Didn't think of it that way.

Also, if you look at the history of medicine the 60s was one of the era where there were very little medical regulation. Well, there was regulation but the bodies regulating ethics back then also had interest in Pharmaceutical companies and most of them are practising doctors. Finally it may be worth adding that these folks were seen as "pushing the boundaries of science" then so they had almost no one to challenge to their "adventures".