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 is widely regarded as 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.
Some believe that 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.
Perspectives on the study are not unified. Some critics of the prevailing view argue that, in 1932, treatments for syphillis were ineffective and had very severe side effects. Furthermore, the men were asymptomatic at the time of beginning the trials, and that a majority of patients would have stayed so, even without treatment (the serious consequences are real, but not universal). Finally, prevailing medical ethics at the time did not have the exacting standards for informed consent currently expected; doctors routinely withheld information about patient's condition from them. Therefore, they argue, that the initial stages of the trial were ethically defensible according to the standards of the time. However, with the development of an effective, simple treatment and the changing ethical standards as time went on, such arguments are not made in regards to the continuing practice of the study in its latter years.
References:
- James H. Jones. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press, 1981 & 1993.
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