...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...

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!

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.

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.