On Monday and Tuesday, a White House bioethics panel - the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues – heard the shocking details of the American-run venereal disease tests on Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients in the post World War II years!

The panel - which is investigating the sordid history of a study pertaining to venereal diseases tests – heard that between 1946 and 1948, US taxpayers, via the Public Health Service, paid for Guatemalan prostitutes infected with syphilis to have sex with prisoners.

Appallingly, when some of the prisoners failed to become infected through sex with the syphilis-infected Guatemalan prostitutes, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on the penises or faces of the prisoners, and, in some cases, even injected by spinal puncture.

The panel also heard that 1,300 out of the nearly 5,500 Guatemalans enrolled for the ‘task’ were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid; and at least 83 of them died, though it was not clear whether the experiments - conducted by the US National Institutes of Health - killed them. Records also showed that almost 700 of them were treated with antibiotics; while there is no specific information about those who apparently were never treated.

When the gruesome episode came to light last year, President Obama sent in an apology to Guatemala’s President Álvaro Colom for the experiments. And, now with the panel hearing the details, its chairperson Amy Gutmann – who is also the president of the University of Pennsylvania - said: “This was a very dark chapter in the history of medical research sponsored by the U. S. government”!