Syphilis Experiment On 399 Black Men

 Imagine using human beings as labratory animals? It is exactly what happened for forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis.  Imagine 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

  My question about this is how come I never heard about this in my many years of education?  As you read do you think that this is true or just a conspiracy?  Did you ever learn about this in your years of education before college?

  On May 16, 1997 President Clinton apologized for the Tusgkegee Syphilis Experiment to 8 remaining survivors.  The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.

  The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subjects to ensure their cooperation.  The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites.  When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”  A doctor explained, “If the colored population becomes aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, every darky will leave Macon County…” Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study.

  The story finally broke in the Washington Staron July 25, 1972, in an article by Jean Heller of the Associated Press.  In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally far-fetched. Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment?

To read more about this  check out the complete story by Borgna Brunner at : http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Story.asp?s=1207586