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The ugly, inexcusable, racist blot, know as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male cannot be erase from American history. The stain of the Tuskegee experiment on American history shakes even people who still staunchly believe in their country right or wrong. For others, the horror of what the American government did to hundreds of poor black men with syphilis on the pretense of giving them medical care is reason never ever to trust the government or the medical establishment. The United States Public Health Service began tracking 399 black men with untreated syphilis and 201 others in a control group in 1932. The purpose was to chart the natural history of the disease without treatment - something that could readily have been learned from centuries of history. Doctors connected with the study did not even use the term "syphilis." The doctors told those who tested positive for the venereal disease that they had "bad blood." Penicillin was discovered and found to be a cure for syphilis in the 1940's. The black men in the Tuskegee study were not informed, nor were they given the new drug. |
Book reference: BAD BLOOD, by James H. Jones
Just as reprehensible, no efforts were made to explain the nature of syphilis to the infected men or to caution them about spreading the disease to their wives and other sexual contacts. There were no attempts to trace, warn and treat sexual partners, however great the danger involved.
It wasn't until 1972 - 40 years after the Tuskegee experiment began, more than two decades after penicillin could have cured the men - that newspaper reports shamed the Public Health Service into stopping the "experiment."
Rules
Rules for using human beings in medical experiments are supposed to be strict, requiring informed consent and clear understanding of the risk and benefits. In another unrelated medical experiment the government tested new vaccines on retarded children in institutions. Supposedly, experiments like these could not happen again. However, rules are rules, continously evolving and changing, made by greedy, money-grubbing corporations or corrupt judges, incontestably supported by the government and your tax dollars.
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