Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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    Panel to report on controversial medical research project
    (2011) Ove, Torsten
    A presidential panel investigating a controversial 1940s medical research project in Guatemala led by a doctor who later became a prominent professor and dean at the University of Pittsburgh will discuss its findings on Monday at a public meeting in Washington, D.C. Since last fall, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has been investigating U.S. Public Health Service experiments conducted by Dr. John Cutler in which he deliberately infected almost 700 Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients and soldiers with syphilis without their knowledge. After issuing an apology for the research, President Barack Obama directed his bioethics panel to…
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    Information on Protection of Human Subjects in Research Funded or Regulated by U.S. Government
    U.S. Department of Health and, Human Services
    Today, a researcher who is compliant with current Federal regulations would not be able to conduct a study, domestically or in another country, with the ethical violations present in the Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Inoculation Study. The history of biomedical research in the U.S., 1940-1970’s: There was tremendous growth in research around World War II. Human subjects research entered what some scholars have described as an “unashamedly utilitarian phase.” Subjects were often institutionalized individuals who were not always fully informed of the risks of the study or asked for consent. Infectious disease research, particularly venereal diseases, was a focus of the U.S. government because of the toll diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea were taking on the armed services. One method for studying infectious disease was by intentionally infecting subjects with the disease-causing pathogen. Prisoners were commonly used because they were easily monitored in a highly controlled environment. Dr. Cutler was a researcher on two such studies: infection of prisoners with gonorrhea at the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute (1943) and with syphilis at Sing Sing Correctional Facility (1953).
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    Records of Dr. John C. Cutler
    (2011) Cutler, John C.
    (From National Archives Press Release) From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau collaborated with several government agencies in Guatemala on U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded studies involving deliberate exposure of human subjects with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases (STD). Guatemalan partners included the Guatemalan Ministry of Health, the National Army of the Revolution, the National Mental Health Hospital, and the Ministry of Justice. Studies were conducted under the on-site direction of John C. Cutler, MD in Guatemala City, under the supervision of R.C. Arnold MD and John F. Mahoney, MD of the USPHS VDRL in Staten Island, New York; the primary local collaborator was Dr. Juan Funes, chief of the VD control division of the Guatemalan Sanidad Publica. According to a “Syphilis Summary Report” and experimental logs in the archives, syphilis studies included Commercial Sex Workers, prisoners, and patients in the mental hospital. In the series of syphilis studies, a total of 696 subjects of individual experiments (some representing the same patients involved in several experiments) were exposed to infection (by sexual contact or inoculation).
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    National Archives Releases John Cutler Papers Online
    (2011) UNSPECIFIED
    Atlanta, GA…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. This collection which consists of approximately 12,000 pages of correspondence, reports, photographs, and patient records was donated in September of 1990 to the University of Pittsburgh by Dr. Cutler. In September 2010, the University contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to request the transfer of the material to the Federal government. After examining the material, it was determined that they were Federal records and they were transferred to the National Archives at Atlanta in October, 2010.