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NARA Posts Documents on Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments

From UNREDACTED (Decades Later, NARA Posts Documents on Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments, by Kate Doyle, April 25, 2011):

Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. public health researchers infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mentally ill patients with syphilis and gonorrhea, without their knowledge or consent, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin. The experiments were carried out in Guatemala under the cloak of confidentiality, and the results were never published in the United States. But after a scholar discovered archives chronicling the program at the University of Pittsburgh and published her findings last year, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took custody of the documents and on March 29 made them publicly available.

From the NARA press release:

The National Archives at Atlanta announced that on March 29, 2011, it will release online the papers of Dr. John C. Cutler. Dr. Cutler, a former employee of the U.S. Public Health Service, 1942-1967, was involved in research on Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, and mental health patients who were exposed to the syphilis bacteria. The collection is available online [http://www.archives.gov/research/health/cdc-cutler-records] and at the National Archives at Atlanta, located at 5780 Jonesboro Road, Morrow, Georgia, 30260.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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