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Tuskegee Syphilis Conspiracy

Topic started on 19-12-2008 @ 01:02 AM by TrueAmerican

Tuskegee Syphilis Conspiracy

query.nytimes.com

...400 black men infected with syphilis went untreated for decades in a federally financed experiment...

...Yet their families -- the wives and children they may have unwittingly exposed to the disease -- have remained largely unseen and unheard, bearing in silence a legacy of anger and shame as well as possible damage to their health. In an acknowledgment of the harm that may have been done, the Federal Government, since 1975, has been quietly running a small program that provides medical...

(visit the link for the full news article)

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reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 01:02 AM by TrueAmerican

Now here's what appears to be a genuine conspiracy, and a search on ATS turned up 0.

I came upon this through the following short but sweet youtube video entitled:

CONSPIRACY ?

5-star rated, over 2,000 ratings, and it covers the best conspiracies from a brief but frank point of view. Highly recommended.

YouTube Link

As the author puts them all in context, this one outrageous act treating men as guinea pigs can be reminiscent of Nazi human experiment horrors. The barbaric way they just FORGET the basic human rights of these 400 men and didn't even cure them when THEY HAD THE CURE!

When will humanity ever recognize the value of human life BEFORE personal interest? No matter what that "noble" cause might seem to be worth?

What's it worth to those innocent suffering the physical torture?

query.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 02:04 AM by CosmicEgg

This is truly an atrocity perpetrated by the government. But it wasn't just the government. It was medical doctors. We all know we can't trust the government, but just as much we must open our eyes to the fact that we cannot trust medical professionals. They are no less unethical, no less dishonest, no less disinterested in the well-being of their fellow man than any branch of government.

Ask yourselves this: If you went to the doctor in need of care for your infant but you had no insurance, no income and therefore no way to pay for the treatment, the medication nor any successive treatments or medications that may be needed as a result of whatever the doctor discovers, how many of you believe that your hometown GP would let you in the door? Would that doctor work pro bono? Would they uphold their oath?

Not just GPs, but what about your dentist? Your Ob/Gyn? Your pediatrician? Your geriatrist? Your psychiatrist? Your veterinarian? They've all taken oaths to value your health and well-being to the utmost of their skill but if you don't cough up the dosh, you won't breathe their air.

At no point in that article did I see anything at all indicating the relevance of leaving syphilis untreated. What did they want to find out? That it might disappear on its own? That if you believe that you're being treated that you'll be healed by your own belief?

Are these the same doctors who are now prescribing mostly placebos to their patients? www.ama-assn.org...

Do a search for "Placebos" in the news search parameter and see what comes up. Doctors are finding out that most of what they do is, in fact, placebo. It works because we believe it will work. Too many of us nowadays are figuring out that their treatments don't work. That's true. They never have. But if placebos could work on something like syphilis, maybe we don't actually need doctors for much at all. Maybe they know that better than we do. Maybe that's why they often do more harm than good when they prescribe pharmaceuticals. Those can, will and do poison you. Hacking up your body can, will and does permanently harm you.

With all the other treatment methods out there, maybe it's time we started thinking about in what and in whom we trust. If we think/understand that the body is more than just a bunch of cells schlepping around together for a few dozen circuits of the sun, that we are energy too (that's why you can't stitch hunks of meat together and produce a living being), then maybe we could look at disease first as an expression of unbalanced energies and treat that first. Ah, but that takes a healer who heals you with their will and that requires love to make it work. How many doctors do you know with that as their specialty?

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 02:52 AM by Long Lance

i's quite widel known, though and it has been mentioned at least a few times on ATS.

my search yielded

www.abovetopsecret.com...

it's a shame how gullible people are today, when they think it ain#t happening any more. welcome to the laboratory and don't forget to take your 'meds'...

AboveTopSecret.com is advertising supported.

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 02:56 AM by americandingbat

The Tuskegee Experiments were one of the absolute moral low points of American History, and are something I think every American should be aware of.

But how does that make this Breaking Alternative News?

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 03:06 AM by TrueAmerican

wow, I searched 'Tuskegee Syphilis' and the sucka told me no search results. Grrr... And I don't remember ever hearing about it, so you see how this can happen. Ok cool, they can shut it down trash it, or w/e. Thanks... But I dunno, that video's still pretty good.

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 03:19 AM by Chaoticar

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
As the author puts them all in context, this one outrageous act treating men as guinea pigs can be reminiscent of Nazi human experiment horrors.

Tuskegee Re-examined

Erm, no:
While the African-Americans in the Tuskegee Experiment were volunteers, the Jews/Gypsies etc tested on in Nazi concentration camps were not volunteers - the same comparison of Tuskegee volunteers to "Nazi human experiments" can be done with "modern drug test subjects" substituted for Tuskegee volunteers.

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
The barbaric way they just FORGET the basic human rights of these 400 men and didn't even cure them when THEY HAD THE CURE!

(Note: All following information is derived from the Tuskegee Re-examined site)

Actually, no - they didn't:

Not everyone went without attempted therapy. The Tuskegee study was meant to be a study of men with later stage latent syphilis, who had been infected for at least five years and were not contagious. One Tuskegee research report states: 'The patients [in the study] who had syphilis were all in the latent stage: any acute cases requiring treatment were carefully screened out for standard therapy.' (5) It would appear that those who were in the early stages of infection were treated. It is only in the early stages of infection that sores appear; those sores disappear with the passage of time. It is also only during the early stages that the disease is contagious, which is also when the therapies of the 1930s were ideally administered and thought to have their greatest effect.

All "African-Americans" used in the Tuskegee Experiment were past the contagious - and in those times "curable" - stage:
Whether the study continued or not, the same result would have occurred.

I also learned that the therapies of that era were in fact so weak, hazardous, lengthy, costly and difficult to administer that very few people with syphilis were willing to tolerate the drugs for the full course of the treatment. Most patients (perhaps 85 per cent) simply voted with their feet and gave up on the 'therapy'. Of those who did suffer through the full treatment (it could take more than a year and required carefully monitored intravenous administration of the drug) relatively few patients were ever cured of the syphilis infection or protected against its potentially damaging effects because of those therapies.

Benedek and Erlen present evidence showing the weakness of the 1930s drugs (people receiving little or no treatment did almost as well as those going through a long, expensive, painful and risky treatment).

In addition, it was hard to tell whether arsenical poisoning or any other therapy administered during the early stages of infection, really had a sufficiently beneficial long-term effect.

The second theme of the counter-narrative, is that we should not presume that the life-course morbidity and mortality profiles of the Tuskegee men were significantly influenced for the worse by participation in the study. Between 1932 and the time penicillin was standardised, readily available and medically approved as a cure for syphilitic infections (which was well into the 1950s), the treatments of the day were weak and ineffective.

By the time penicillin was available the men in the study had been infected for at least 20 years, and in most cases for much longer. A minority had died, some from complications (cardiovascular diseases) caused by syphilis, but this had occurred before an effective therapy was available. For a large number of the rest, by the 1950s their original infection would have been self-limiting or self-correcting. Of those many men who were still alive in the 1950s and 1960s it remains unclear whether penicillin treatment for late latent syphilis would have had any effect on their life expectancy or health profiles. If the syphilis infection was going to damage their heart value or some other biological system, it would in all likelihood have done so long before the 1950s, and penicillin could not reverse that damage. Some forms of inflammation, if still caused by the infection, would presumably have been curable, but there is evidence that as the remarkable men from Tuskegee got older their life expectancy compared quite favourably with men from Macon County who were never infected.

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
When will humanity ever recognize the value of human life BEFORE personal interest? No matter what that "noble" cause might seem to be worth?

I also learned that the study emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and wellbeing of the African-American population. The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 03:20 AM by Chaoticar

Now, that's a lot to digest, however the three main points are as follows:
1. It was percieved that there was no cure for syphilis in the asymptomatic stage - the stage that the Tuskegee volunteers were in:
* Associated with this is the fact that African-American volunteers who were symptomatic for syphilis were refused entry to the Experiment and treated - surely a pointless endeavour.
2. The first "true" cure for syphilis (penicillin) was discovered decades later - in which case the Tuskegee volunteers were either:
* Dead by syphilis-related illnesses, or
* Dead by other causes, or
* Alive, but due to the self-limiting/correcting nature of syphilis at this stage, treatment would be pointless
Not only that, but those medicines that passed as "cures" were not only painful, risky and expensive, but also protected from the effects of/cured the disease in a very small group. In fact, survival rates for "cured" and "non-cured" groups of syphilis sufferers in the 1930s often had no significant difference
3. The health of the Tuskegee volunteers does not seem to have been adversely affected by the Experiment - in fact (possibly due to the constant health checks?), Tuskegee volunteers had a higher life expectancy than their non-infected Macon County counterparts!
4. All "African-Americans" involved were not only volunteers, but in full awareness of their condition - not only that, but the study was supported by the wider "African-American" community.

In fact, the only evidence of "racism" is that the study chose "African-Americans" over white Americans.
However - after considering the above points - where is the "racism"?:
"Cures" for syphilis at that time were costly and mostly ineffective. All involved were volunteers. All knew that they had syphilis. All were asymptomatic, and therefore deemed "uncurable" (all symptomatic volunteers were offerred the cure). The survivors had higher survival rates than those not-infected!

The Tuskegee Experiment is a pretty bad example of "medical experimentation GONE WRONG!" imho.

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 03:26 AM by avingard

If true that is certainly atrocious and the descendants are rightly entitled to some kind of compensation.

However, I'm not sure I see the conspiracy if the point was to find a cure. Unethical maybe, maybe even cruel, but there isn't enough evidence of the controllers intent to really say if this was a conspiracy or a misguided experiment.

[edit on 19-12-2008 by avingard]

reply posted on 19-12-2008 @ 02:53 PM by CosmicEgg

reply to post by Chaoticar

This is what NPR reports: www.npr.org...
It's not long. Worth the few seconds it takes to read it. There's plenty of links to read more about it, like this one: www.cdc.gov.... None of it seems to indicate that the story reported by spiked was in any way correct though.

I have to wonder why the government would apologize decades later for something that was in fact ethical and fairly carried out. Seems a bit unlikely, doesn't it?

AboveTopSecret.com is advertising supported.

reply posted on 20-12-2008 @ 10:57 AM by Long Lance

if all that was true, there would not have been any harm in spilling the beans on their illness, i presume.

it's actually quite simple, they were being dishonest and cared much more for their silly WW2-style experiments rather than the peoples' wellbeing. the seemed to prefer black people as gunea pigs, too, which isn't all that surprising if you consider segregation policies of that time period.

PS: can you believe your physician or not, that's the question. from what i've seen so far, any and every 'professional' ie. someone who's doing a speciality for a living will with near certainty first and foremost toe to the party line and give you soothing BS rather than the goods you asked for. simple matter of experience.

reply posted on 20-12-2008 @ 11:13 AM by Tricky63

What do you mean if this were true?It is true.This is only the crap that we know about.Think about the things that were done that we don't or ever will know about.If I'm not mistaken Pres.Clinton issued an apology about this.

reply posted on 21-12-2008 @ 01:30 PM by Long Lance

Originally posted by Tricky63
What do you mean if this were true?It is true.This is only the crap that we know about.Think about the things that were done that we don't or ever will know about.If I'm not mistaken Pres.Clinton issued an apology about this.

heck, no i was responding to the two posts above, which tried to diminish the physicians' wrongdoing of using their patients as guinea pigs, but forrgot to use 'reply to'.