US infected 2,500 Guatemalans with STDs

[MobBoss]

I'd rather deal in facts as opposed to making such assumptions.

Again, Form, no one is saying this wasnt wrong; but making wild allegation about what may or may not happened as a result is just pot stirring without any real evidence to back up such claims.

And these are two completely different situations; so what occurred in Tuskegee has no real factual bearing here at all.

I'm assuming the US paid these sex workers so handsomely that they stopped working or having sex ever then?

Who knows? Maybe they reformed right afterwords and decided to join a nunnery. Either claim is just as valid as the other since the actual facts are not known.

 

[keli]

Surprise surprise, it seems that the goverment of the USA is not an inch better than which was the Soviet goverment...

 

[Sonereal]

Why do you keep saying "wild allegation" as if this entire thing is just a theoretical case?

 

[MobBoss]

Why do you keep saying "wild allegation" as if this entire thing is just a theoretical case?

This has been investigated and studied via what the OP says. There are still many 'unknowns' involving it. What you are speculating about right now isnt known or supported by any facts as we know it.

Thats why.

 

[Sonereal]

This has been investigated and studied via what the OP says. There are still many 'unknowns' involving it. What you are speculating about right now isnt known or supported by any facts as we know it.

Thats why.

There's a huge difference between wild speculation and naturally following what happened. Again, did the infected sex workers (who we know did not give consent nor were informed and were told to infect soldiers) stop having sex after the experiment? Did ALL of those still infected following the experiment stop having sex?

It makes a lot more sense to think some kept having sex and therefore, spread the disease as opposed to thinking that ALL of them stopped having sex.

 

[MobBoss]

Except that 'naturally following what happened' has absolutely zero real evidence or fact to support it.

Thats the entire point. We have what facts we have. Anything further than that is just speculation.

For example: You CANT prove that a single one of those 'sex workers' had sex at all after these experiments. You can make assumption all day long that they did, but you have zero proof along those lines.

 

[RedRalph]

Mobboss, you are intelligent guy but you are making an argument that makes it look as if you are being slightly less than intelligent.

 

[Sonereal]

Thats the entire point. We have what facts we have. Anything further than that is just speculation.

Can you prove to me that the sex workers stopped having sex?

Because that doesn't make sense. If they had stopped having sex or were told to stop having sex, they it would have been all over this article. But the fact that it isn't points to them not knowing and therefore, continuing with what they do.

 

[MobBoss]

Can you prove to me that the sex workers stopped having sex?

I have just as much proof that they did, as you have proof they didnt.

Thats the point.

Now, do you want to concede my point, or are you just interested in continuing this circular argument?

Because that doesn't make sense. If they had stopped having sex or were told to stop having sex, they it would have been all over this article. But the fact that it isn't points to them not knowing and therefore, continuing with what they do.

Why would it have been in this article? Perhaps the person who told them that neglected to record it anywhere? Thats logically false to simply assume that either way.

What you are alleging isnt part of the facts of this case as given in the OP. If you want to turn this into an exercise in fantasy thats fine; but it has no real bearing on what did or didnt happen in this particular case.

 

[Formaldehyde]

IMore details about what happened than what the article in the OP or the Wiki article provides:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.

If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.

“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

In the 1940s, Professor Reverby said, the United States Public Health Service “was deeply interested in whether penicillin could be used to prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection, whether better blood tests for the disease could be established, what dosages of penicillin actually cured infection, and to understand the process of re-infection after cures.”

It had difficulties growing syphilis in the laboratory, and its tests on rabbits and chimpanzees told it little about how penicillin worked in humans.

In 1944, it injected prison “volunteers” at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana with lab-grown gonorrhea, but found it hard to infect people that way.

In 1946, Dr. Cutler was asked to lead the Guatemala mission, which ended two years later, partly because of medical “gossip” about the work, Professor Reverby said, and partly because he was using so much penicillin, which was costly and in short supply.

Dr. Cutler would later join the study in Tuskegee, Ala., which had begun relatively innocuously in 1932 as an observation of how syphilis progressed in black male sharecroppers. In 1972, it was revealed that, even when early antibiotics were invented, doctors hid that fact from the men in order to keep studying them. Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, defended the Tuskegee experiment in a 1993 documentary.

Deception was also used in Guatemala, Professor Reverby said. Dr. Thomas Parran, the former surgeon general who oversaw the start of Tuskegee, acknowledged that the Guatemala work could not be done domestically, and details were hidden from Guatemalan officials.

Professor Reverby said she found some of Dr. Cutler’s papers at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until 1985, while she was researching Dr. Parran.

“I’m sifting through them, and I find ‘Guatemala ... inoculation ...’ and I think ‘What the heck is this?’ And then it was ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.’ My partner was with me, and I told him, ‘You aren’t going to believe this.’ ”

Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago’s medical school, said he was stunned. “This is shocking,” Dr. Siegler said. “This is much worse than Tuskegee — at least those men were infected by natural means.”

He added: “It’s ironic — no, it’s worse than that, it’s appalling — that, at the same time as the United States was prosecuting Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, the U.S. government was supporting research that placed human subjects at enormous risk.”

The Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors who experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners led to a code of ethics, though it had no force of law. In the 1964 Helsinki Declaration, the medical associations of many countries adopted a code.

The Tuskegee scandal and the hearings into it conducted by Senator Edward M. Kennedy became the basis for the 1981 American laws governing research on human subjects, Dr. Siegler said.

It was preceded by other domestic scandals. From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected ******ed children with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors.

 

[RedRalph]

I have just as much proof that they did, as you have proof they didnt.

Thats the point.

Oh for Christ's sake... how are you not embarrased to present these 'arguments'? Just give it up.

Moderator Action: Please address the points rather than the poster (infraction for a few posts).
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Sonereal]

I have just as much proof that they did, as you have proof they didnt.

Thats the point.

Now, do you want to concede my point, or are you just interested in continuing this circular argument?

Except that they were sex workers who weren't compensated in any way for the trials so there's no reason to believe they stopped being sex workers. Common sense can be used to fill in the gaps. Why are you acting as if I'm pulling the idea that sex workers have sex often out of my ass?

Why would it have been in this article? Perhaps the person who told them that neglected to record it anywhere?

Because if it was a serious medical trial, they would have to record it. That's how experiments work. I've done psychology and AP Bio labs. In both, you're supposed to record VERY IMPORTANT DETAILS like that.

What you are alleging isnt part of the facts of this case as given in the OP. If you want to turn this into an exercise in fantasy thats fine; but it has no real bearing on what did or didnt happen in this particular case.

Do sex workers not have sex where you're from?

 

[MobBoss]

Except that they were sex workers who weren't compensated in any way for the trials so there's no reason to believe they stopped being sex workers. Common sense can be used to fill in the gaps. Why are you acting as if I'm pulling the idea that sex workers have sex often out of my ass?

Because there is no proof to support your various allegations here. You dont know if the sex workers were cured or not prior to the end of the experiment. You dont know if they continued to even be 'sex workers' after the experiement.

Common sense in this case is to simply admit the lack of evidence; not to assume something because thats what you think occurred.

Because if it was a serious medical trial, they would have to record it. That's how experiments work. I've done psychology and AP Bio labs. In both, you're supposed to record VERY IMPORTANT DETAILS like that.

This was also a trial being done that was potentially criminal and certainly not ethical. That being the case there might have been more than a bit not recorded; or perhaps it was, but lost over the last 60+ years.

Do sex workers not have sex where you're from?

Can not sex workers stop being sex workers where you come from?

 

[Sonereal]

Because there is no proof to support your various allegations here. You dont know if the sex workers were cured or not prior to the end of the experiment. You dont know if they continued to even be 'sex workers' after the experiement.

Common sense in this case is to simply admit the lack of evidence; not to assume something because thats what you think occurred.

I'm done arguing this because you don't seem to even notice how completely silly your reasoning is. Given that this trial is very similar, if not a near carbon-copy of Tuskegee, there's no reason to think that ALL the sex workers were cured. There's no reason to think that ALL the sex workers, after the experiment, had any reason to ALL change their occupation.

This was also a trial being done that was potentially criminal and certainly not ethical. That being the case there might have been more than a bit not recorded; or perhaps it was, but lost over the last 60+ years.

Yet we still have the details of Little Albert.

Can not sex workers stop being sex workers where you come from?

They can. They just don't when I need them to because if they did, my argument about experiment groups all quitting their pre-trial occupations would look silly to anyone whose taken high school psychology.

Oh wait....

 

[MobBoss]

I'm done arguing this because you don't seem to even notice how completely silly your reasoning is.

My reasoning isnt silly; but based upon fact and what is known vs what is not known.

It is absent of speculation. If dealing with fact alone is silly to you, then I guess we dont have anything to discuss further.

They can.

Well there ya go.

 

[hoplitejoe]

Your idea of what is illogical may make sense in certain situations but here it is just pedantic.

 

[Traitorfish]

Can not sex workers stop being sex workers where you come from?

Generally? No, for reasons related to financial dependence, social exclusion, threats of violence, and so on. I imagine that those reasons are only more pronounced in an underdeveloped region like Guatemala.

 

[MobBoss]

Generally? No, for reasons related to financial dependence, social exclusion, threats of violence, and so on. I imagine that those reasons are only more pronounced in an underdeveloped region like Guatemala.

The problem I hvae is with people using their imagination as opposed to facts related to this issue.

Especially when dealing with something like compensation or a claims process. Are you willing to pay someone compensation based upon a specious claim that they got an STD from someone who alledgedly had sex with a sex worker involved in that experimentation based upon no other evidence but word of mouth?

I wouldnt and I know the government wouldnt. Nor should they just pay out our tax dollars based upon specious claims with no hard facts backing up the claim.

Now then, if the story changes, and there is indeed some hard evidence to indicate what you imagine to be is true, then i'll concede the point. But until then, lets just deal with the facts as we currently know them to be without resorting to imagination.

 

[Birdjaguar]

My reasoning isnt silly; but based upon fact and what is known vs what is not known.

It is absent of speculation. If dealing with fact alone is silly to you, then I guess we dont have anything to discuss further.

Well there ya go.

Your idea of what is illogical may make sense in certain situations but here it is just pedantic.

Moderator Action: Enough is enough. MB your reasoning isn't silly, but your argument is, so stop. That applies to the rest of you too. We created RD threads just to prevent this kind of silly back and forth that makes us all crazy.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889