15. American prisoners in gonorrhea treatment experiments
American prisoners held in custody by both states and the federal government also volunteered for their bodies to be used as the platform for medical experiments regarding venereal diseases during World War II. Venereal diseases posed a serious, and sometimes critical, problem for the United States military forces during the Second World War. At the start of American involvement in the war, a case of gonorrhea required a course of hospital treatment for 30 days. Syphilis required a grueling course of treatment which lasted six months. The costs of the treatments and the loss of the man-hours imposed burdens on the military, both in money and in operational readiness. The development of better drugs for treatment of venereal diseases became part of the military’s strategy for dealing with the crisis.
Volunteers for experimentation with new drugs again appeared in the nation’s prison population. In one study, conducted in the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, 241 prisoners were deliberately infected with venereal diseases in return for $100. They also obtained the promise of a letter of recommendation to their parole board, though some did not receive them, the promise forgotten after the war ended. The research included curative agents and prophylactics. The researchers eventually found the unreliability of inducing gonorrhea in test subjects rendered the tests invalid, and the results thus inconclusive. Other experiments, such as the famous Tuskegee Institute study, often used men who were not informed volunteers of the ordeal to which they submitted.