GUATEMALA EXPERIMENTS 1946-1948 
II 
Gonorrhea is a contagious 
disease caused by the bacterium 
Neisseria gonontioeae. Similar to 
syphilis, gonorrhea is transmitted 
largely through sexual contact 
and can also be spread from 
mother to fetus during pregnancy. 
Symptoms may vary depending 
on the gender of the individual 
infected. Signs of infection in 
men include a burning sensation 
during urination, or a white, 
yellow, or green discharge from 
the penis. Women on the other 
hand, exhibit either mild or no 
symptoms at all. Gonorrhea 
can be cured by antibiotics, but 
there are currently an increasing 
number of drug-resistant strains 
that are difficult to treat. 
Gonorrhea Experiments 
Overview 
Intentional exposure gonorrhea experiments 
involved approximately 582 people including 
at least four commercial sex workers and 518 
soldiers from February 1947 to July 1948, 
psychiatric patients from June 1948 through 
September 1948, and ten additional subjects 
during the same period whose background 
is unknown. Of the subjects exposed to 
gonorrhea (an STD caused by the bacte- 
rium Neisseria gonorrhoeae ), available records 
document only 23 7 receiving any form of 
treatment. 327 The primary purpose of the 
gonorrhea experiments in the Guatemalan 
Army was to test the effectiveness of different 
prophylaxis measures including the orvus- 
mapharsen solution, a 10-percent argyrol 
(i.e., silver) intra-urethral instillation, the U.S. Army “pro kit,” and oral peni- 
cillin. 328 The experiments in the Psychiatric Hospital appear to have been 
primarily observational (i.e., no prophylaxis or treatment was tested). 
The researchers required “ample supplies of pus” carrying the gonorrhea 
bacteria for their gonorrhea experiments. To obtain such samples, they turned 
to patients “under arsenical treatment for syphilis” at the Military Hospital. 329 
There, the researchers sought to infect the syphilis patients with gonorrhea in 
order to create a “reservoir of infect[i]on” from which to draw. 330 
In his 1952 retrospective summary of their work, the Experimental Studies 
in Gonorrhea report, Dr. Cutler wrote that all experimental infections 
were treated with penicillin in the form of injections of 300,000 units of 
a repository delayed-absorption preparation. 331 However, the researchers' 
contemporaneous records reveal that some of the subjects they infected 
received treatment with a bismuth-arsenic combination, 332 and many of the 
subjects were never treated at all. 333 
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