Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available. The revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections. President Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the United States to victims of the study.
About Tuskegee Syphilis Study in brief
The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis. The revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections. President Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the United States to victims of the study, calling it shameful and racist. The study has also been an important cause of distrust in medical science and the US government amongst African Americans. The researchers involved with the experiment reasoned that they were not harming the men involved in theStudy, under the presumption that the men were unlikely to ever receive treatment. At that time, it was believed that the effects of syphilis depended on the race of those affected. Physicians believed that syphilis had a more pronounced effect on African-Americans’ cardiovascular systems than on their central nervous systems. The men were initially told that the study was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years. It has been cited as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.” The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. It is still not known if the men ever received any treatment for their syphilis or if they were ever cured of the disease. The results of this study have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) The study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) The purpose of thisStudy was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men in the study were told they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the US.
As an incentive for participation in the Study, they were promised free medical care, but were deceived by the PHS, who never informed subjects of their diagnosis, despite the risk of infecting others. The PHS also disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment. In the study a total of 600 impoverished, African- American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama were enrolled. Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected. At the study’s commencement, medical textbooks had recommended that all syphilis be treated as the leading cause of death within the southern African American community. The term ‘syphilis’ included the term “bad colloquialism’, which included various conditions such as syphilis anemia and fatigue, bone deterioration, deafness, mental illness, heart deterioration, collapse of the central nervous system, and death. The Tuskeegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male was a study of the pathology associated with syphilis in a black male population.
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This page is based on the article Tuskegee Syphilis Study published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
