Syphilis tops gonorrhea as No.1 sexual disease

Syphilis has surpassed gonorrhea and become the number one sexually transmitted disease in Beijing.

Reported cases grew by 21 percent last year to 4,144 cases. The city will soon provide free checkup and treatment of syphilis at community clinics.

Syphilis cases have grown 17.51 percent every year from 2004 to 2009, according to the official report released Thursday by the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau, mostly among 20- to 39-year-olds, followed by 50-plus years of age.

U.S. Apologizes for Abusive Guatemala Human Medical Experiments

Earlier this year Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby came upon the unpublished study outlining the 1940s experiment led by controversial U.S. Public Health Service physician John C. Cutler. Cutler and his fellow researchers enrolled people in Guatemala, including mental patients, for the study, which aimed to find out if penicillin, a relatively new drug at the time, could be used to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Evidently, the study participants never gave informed consent. Rather, many of the subjects were deceived about what was being done to them.

U.S. Apologizes for Giving Guatemalans Gonorrhea

This one was a no-brainer: On Thursday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized on behalf of the United States for a 1940s medical experiment in which government researchers purposefully infected Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients, and women with gonorrhea and syphilis—without their knowledge or consent. Said Clinton and Sebelius in a statement: "The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," adding, "Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices." The research, which was recently discovered by a women’s studies professor at Wellesley College, involved 696 subjects and was to test the drug penicillin, which was new at the time.