Guatemalans on Saturday slammed a US confession that it led a 1940s study in the Central American country in which hundreds of people were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases.
"No matter how much of a superpower it is, the United States cannot do this kind of experimentation," Nery Rodenas, the chief of the human rights office at the archbishop of Guatemala's office, told reporters.
"There is no evidence study participants gave informed consent, and in fact... the subjects were often deceived about what was being done to them," Collins told reporters as he outlined the experiment's most flagrant ethics violations."
Initially, the researchers infected female Guatemalan commercial sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, and then allowed them to have unprotected sex with soldiers or prison inmates.