US apology over Guatemala syphilis experiments

Guatamala's government has said that a special commission will be formed to investigate experiments conducted in the 1940s in which US government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.

In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released a statement stating the study was "unethical" and apologized to the Guatemalan people.

Giuseppe Calvinisti, a spokesman for the Guatemalan President's office, said Guatemala and the US would form an investigation commission to determine the facts behind this research. He also said victims would be tracked down to compensate them.

"The President has said he's looking to form a binational commission to investigate these cases and look for the victims in order to find some kind of compensation for them within this commission," said Calvinisti.

Guatemala City residents were disgusted by the news. :"We thank the lady because as US Secretary of State she recognized human beings were used for these type of awful experiments for the world," said Hilner Espana.

The experiment, which echoed the infamous 1960s Tuskegee study in which black American men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis, was revealed by Susan Reverby a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

She discovered information about the experiments while following up on a book about Tuskegee and, informed the US government before she published her findings.