John Hopkins Hospital, one of America’a biggest institutions is facing a $1 Billion (USD) lawsuit for allegedly conducting medical experiments regarding sexually transmitted diseases and infections on black people and without consent.
According to information released by the Holistic Lifestyle Foundation for people of colour, they claim that Blacks in the USA have been the guinea pigs of Western medical experiments for centuries now.
One of the more prominent experiments (that the public is aware of) was the Tuskegeesyphilis experiment from the 1930s. Scientists studied poor Blacks in Alabama who’d contracted the venereal disease, but did not tell them they had the disease or do anything to cure them.
A similar study has come to the forefront and it involves one of the nation’s most prestigious medical institutions, John Hopkins University. A lawsuit filed in April alleges Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation helped conduct similar experiments in Guatemala from 1945 to 1956.
Marta Orellana was experimented on when she was nine years old.
According to the lawsuit, orphans, inmates, psychiatric patients and prostitutes weredeliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases to determine what drugs, including penicillin, worked best in stopping the diseases. The subjects of the experiments were not told they had been infected, causing some to die and others to pass the disease to their spouses, sexual partners and children.
The lawsuit alleges the Rockefeller Foundation funded Johns Hopkins’ research into public health issues, including venereal disease, and employed scientists who monitored the Guatemala experiments. The suit also states that Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Foundation designed, supported and benefited from the Guatemala experiments.
The following experiments were performed.
- Prostitutes were infected with venereal disease and then provided for sex to subjects for intentional transmission of the disease;
- Subjects were inoculated by injection of syphilis spirochaetes into the spinal fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord, under the skin, and on mucous membranes;
- An emulsion containing syphilis or gonorrhoea was spread under the foreskin of the penis in male subjects;
- The penis of male subjects was scraped and scarified and then coated with the emulsion containing syphilis or gonorrhea;
- A woman from the psychiatric hospital was injected with syphilis, developed skin lesions and wasting, and then had gonorrhoeal pus from a male subject injected into both of her eyes and;
- Children were subjected to blood studies to check for the presence of venereal disease.
The suit has 774 plaintiffs, including people who were subjects in the experiments and their descendants, and seeks more than $1 billion in damages. This is the second attempt to collect damages.
In 2012, a class-action federal lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government over the Guatemala experiments conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service. It was dismissed, as the Guatemalans could not sue the United States for grievances that happened overseas. As of then, a new lawsuit has been filed in the Baltimore City Circuit Court.
Both John Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation deny involvement, but do not deny that the experiments took place. In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized to Guatemala for the experiments, saying they were “clearly unethical.”-Online
