Legal News

Echoes of Tuskegee in Suit by Guatamalans Against U.S.

By Ashby Jones

Anytime you see the phrase “medical experiments” high up in a story, you can rest assured the story’s going to contain some sort of ghastly allegation.

And indeed that’s what we have here, with a post from the BLT blog on a lawsuit filed by seven Guatemala citizens on Monday against U.S. health officials. The allegation: That as part of medical tests carried out in the 1940s, U.S. doctors infected hundreds of Guatamalans with syphilis. Click here for the AP story.

Click here for the complaint. According to the BLT blog:

The class action stems from a 2009 study by Susan Reverby, a Wellesley College professor who found evidence that the U.S. government signed off on nonconsensual experiments on Guatemalan prisoners, orphans and patients in a mental hospital between 1946 and 1948. President Obama issued an official apology following the release of Reverby's study.

The complaint . . . broadens the scope of the allegations. The plaintiffs accuse U.S. officials of carrying out experiments and infecting Guatemalans with syphilis through the early 1970s.

Piper Hendricks, one of the Conrad & Scherer attorneys handling the case, said that given parallels with the experiments in Tuskegee, Ala., in which hundreds of African American men with syphilis were left untreated as U.S. doctors studied the effects of the disease from the 1930s through the 1970s, "there is no clear-cut timeline for what happened in Guatemala."

Hendricks said she expects the class to grow as word spreads; the complaint notes that there were at least 700 test subjects and that thousands of people could have been affected.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said: “The United States will review the complaint and make a determination as to how we will ultimately respond.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 15, 2011 (boomark / email).