Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2011 as news commentary from 30 August 2011, based on that day’s Prensa Libre coverage. “Today” and the five living survivors “currently being examined” refer to that moment.
While some people think we live in a fairy tale, a world full of good intentions and companies that look out for our safety, the reality is very different. Prensa Libre, the most influential news outlet in Guatemala, today expresses its outrage over an experiment that the United States government illegally carried out on flesh-and-blood human beings between 1946 and 1948.
More than 5,000 people were forced to take part in these experiments; 1,300 were infected and 83 died. Five people who went through these experiments and are still alive are currently being examined to determine the harm that was done to them.
The “lab rats” that the US government selected and forced to take part were orphaned children, mentally ill people, prostitutes, indigenous people and all kinds of people whose version of events nobody would ever believe, since they were seen as society’s “dregs”.
It was inhumane, cruel and monstrous conduct, in what could be a dark chapter in US history, and it would show society how the pharmaceutical industry obtains its medicines. For anyone who doesn’t know, these practices are already being denounced in “the Horn of Africa”. After all, who cares if a starving African child is infected with syphilis and gonorrhea (they were going to die anyway), just as who cares if the H1N1 virus (swine flu) escapes from a laboratory or is deliberately released into the air at a moment of crisis for the drug companies.
If society doesn’t wake up soon and open its eyes, putting certain figures in the pharmaceutical industry, and the politicians who allow this kind of abuse, behind bars, this situation won’t go away on its own, and millions of people around the world will suffer irreparable harm.
Many people will think these things only happened in Nazi movies, but the reality is that they happened, and they are still happening today.
Further reading
- They’re poisoning us: the fraud of the fight against cancer
- The food industry is starting to be compared to the tobacco industry
- A cure for cancer is not a profitable business for drug companies
Featured image: Janice Waltzer, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
