Guatemala finds 5 who survived deadly US research

The Guatemalan government said Tuesday it has tracked down five survivors from a deadly US government research project on sexually transmitted diseases that killed scores of its people.

"So far we have located five men who live in the western part of the country," said Vice President Rafael Espada, who heads up a Guatemalan commission tasked with investigating the US-run research program.

"They'll be be brought to the capital to undergo medical tests" to determine if they suffered any adverse after-effects from the American experimentation, Espada said.

A report ordered by President Barack Obama concluded Monday that at least 83 male test subjects died after being used as human guineas during the American research on venereal disease, conducted between 1946 and 1948.

All told, more than 1,300 people were exposed to venereal diseases by human contact or by inoculations during the research to test the efficacy of penicillin in combating the ailment, the US presidential commission found.

The report found that fewer than 700 test subjects who took part in the research projected conducted by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) ever received the appropriate medical treatment for venereal disease.

Obama personally apologized to Guatemala's President Alvaro Colom last October before ordering a thorough review of the experiment, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as "clearly unethical."

Colom, meanwhile, calling the experiments a "crime against humanity," ordered his own investigation.

(c) 2011 AFP