Tuskegee syphilis study

In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, medical experimenters[?] allowed a group of 400 black Americans around Tuskegee, Alabama to progress to the tertiary stages of syphilis in order to study them, in spite of the existence of effective treatments for syphilis discovered many years before.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study lasted from 1932 to 1972, when it was terminated after being exposed in the press. Since 1947, penicillin had been recognized as a safe and effective treatment for syphilis, yet the remaining members of the Tuskegee group of patients were allowed to sicken and die for another twenty-five years.

The Tuskegee Study represented one of the greatest failures of American medical ethics, and the subject of a presidential apology after the fact to the survivors and their relatives.

The Tuskegee Study has led to a lasting distrust amongst African-Americans of the medical community in general, and medical trials in particular. It has been speculated that this in turn has resulted in under-treatment of African-Americans, and their under-representation in medical trials, in turn leading to poorer medical care for African-Americans for decades to come.

References:

James H. Jones. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press, 1981 & 1993.

External links

• http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lyonsm/tuskegeenew.html
• http://hsc.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/apology/
• http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/index.html
• http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/assignments/experiment/tuskegee.html