Widening the net
Of course, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment is only the most famous bit of syphilitic fun the Public Health Service had. In the late forties, they took the act on the road, heading to Guatemala, where infected prostitutes were supplied to prison inmates, mental patients, and soldiers. Later on, researchers got bored waiting on traditional infection vectors, so they infected hundreds of people by just dumping the disease into open wounds.
The government agency responsible for the health and well-being of American citizens wasn’t the only one doing this. Starting in the late forties, after the horrendous aftereffects of atomic attacks began to become apparent in Japan, the United States Atomic Energy Commission got in the game. Their first project, in a joint venture with the Quaker Oats company, involved feeding radioactive oatmeal to mentally handicapped children at a place called the Fernald School in Massachusetts—less a school than a prison for mentally disabled kids.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, the AEC continued to inject radioactive material into people to test their reactions. In several experiments across the country, they used severely injured or ill people, children, and pregnant women as test subjects for all sorts of toxic or radioactive material.
In 1950, the U.S. Navy opened up a whole new chapter in government experimentation on humans when it burst balloons over San Francisco that contained a biological agent called Serratia marcescens. This bacteria can cause urinary tract infections, pink eye, and potentially deadly infections of the heart valves. The subsequent decade saw attacks by the Atomic Energy Commission (radioactive chemicals sprayed over 2,000 square kilometers in Washington), the CIA (whooping cough released from boats near Tampa Bay), and the Army (attacks on cities in the United States and Canada ranging from aerial deployment of toxic chemical agents to the purposeful release of mosquitoes infected with yellow fever).