A group of Guatemalans yesterday sued the United States government, asking for civil damages arising from a 65-year-old experiment in which prisoners, prostitutes, soldiers and mental hospital patients were intentionally infected with syphilis without their consent.
In this 34-page class action complaint, filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia, seven Guatemalans, including two soldiers who say they were repeatedly inoculated with syphilis during the late 1940’s, seek compensatory and punitive damages from several top US officials. The defendants include Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Regina Benjamin, the Surgeon General, and Harold Varmus, the director of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The lawsuit says that Varmus is named because Harry Eagle, the scientific director at the cancer institute from 1947 to 1949, “created one of the serology tests for syphilis and was likely involved with the non-consensual human medical experimentation studies in Guatemala.”
The NIH funded the study from 1946 to 1948, through a grant to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, which later became the Pan American Health Organization. The director of that organization, Mirta Roses Periago, is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Lawyers for the defendants had written this letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder on 7 March, asking him to set up a claims process through which experimental victims and their survivors could seek compensation outside the court process. When he did not respond by the requested date of 11 March, they filed suit.
“While we are disappointed that the U.S. Government decided not to engage in pre-litigation discussions regarding possible solutions,” said attorneys Terrence Collingsworth and Andres Alonso, “on behalf of our clients, we have now filed the case and will address in court the indignities that they suffered.”
Alonso and Collingsworth are with, respectively, the firm Parker Waichman Alonso in Port Washington, New York and the Washington office of Conrad & Scherer.
Charles Miller, a spokesman for the US Department of Justice, said in an email today that “the United States will review the complaint and make a determination as to how we will ultimately respond.”
The study, discovered by Wellesley historian Susan Reverby (interviewed by Nature here) came to light last October. In November, President Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to conduct “a thorough fact-finding mission into the specifics of the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Diseases Inoculation Study,” as it was called, and into current protections for human research subjects.
Earlier this month, the commission held its first public meeting on the issue. This blog reported on the meeting here.