Tall Tales About Tuskegee

Townhall.com ^ | May 2, 2008 | Jonah Goldberg

[JimC214]

It's always the “Mans” fault. The man made me go out and have 5 kids with 4 woman and made me abandon them so I can party. I mean after all how can I support them on less then 300 dollars an hour. Not my fault that I couldn't keep it in my pants they made me do it. Now where's my reparations? Sarc.

[neverdem]

How so? No man was forced to enter, or remain, in this program. They had already been infected for quite some time ("they were tertiary-stage syphilitics ") so the clearly weren't deliberately infected by the researchers. This particular project* used black men exclusively b/c of the disproportion of the disease in this group.

*Was this type of study never feature on non-blacks? Was Tuskegee the only one ever to exclusively use black? If not, why have we not heard of the others? If so, why no cries of racism, why no outrage that more tests/studies weren't done?

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites —the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis, whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain.

Although the PHS touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.”

This was a study just for the sake of study. Once penicillin was available, the study should have ended. Instead, these men were allowed to continue to infect others, not even informed of the harm they could do to others.

"Some of the doctors believed that treating the decades-long infections would kill the men."

That could be a valid consideration. It's probably a reference to the Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction. I don't know when they were first able to treat a severe allergic reaction, i.e. anaphylactic shock.

[noah]

Who cares what the truth is?? The story, the way J. Wright tells it, is a ringing condemnation of government healthcare. Let it be!

[SE Mom]

Thanks for posting- and thanks to Jonah for getting the facts straight.

What an awful, shameful thing for the government to do to it’s own citizens.

[PLMerite]

What is the treatment for tertiary syphilis today? And what if anything could have been done at the time?

[eleni121]

The New Deal didn’t start until March, 1933

---

True but the same leftist impulses and deceptions were there from the beginning through the Rosenwald Fund - which funded the Syphilis study and was established by one of the founders of Sears, one Julius Rosenwald.

[SunkenCiv]

To which O'Reilly responded: "All right. All governments have done bad things in every country."

And don't forget, O'Reilly set everyone straight about what really happened at Malmedy.

[SunkenCiv]

thanks neverdem.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Tuskegee University | NA | Borgna Brunner
Posted on 05/02/2008 5:22:24 PM PDT by neverdem
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2010486/posts

[Bob]

Instead, these men were allowed to continue to infect others, not even informed of the harm they could do to others.

From the article:

In fact, the patients were selected in the first place because they were tertiary-stage syphilitics who were no longer contagious.

(emphasis mine)

[Eye On The Left]

U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm