Tuskegee Syphilis Research Papers

Syphilis Syphilis is an acute disease that was not perfectly understood until scientists start to do clinical researches over patients having the disease and the bacteria themselves. Experiments were done on syphilis to understand how it proceeds, and how it can be cured. After the discovery of this affliction, doctors tried very hard to understand the disease, so they did various experiments. some of them were legal while others were illegal. In 1932, The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was done on black people in Alabama by U.S public health service. The purpose of that experiment was to understand the progression of syphilis over human body. However, the experiment involved six hundred black men, this disease infected 301 of them and

The bacterium uses the blood as transportation machine that helps it to spread all over the body. Treponema pallidum progresses through four stages, and each stage has different symptoms. The first stage or the primary stage is the stage at which sores appear in the position where the bacterium entered the body. After the entrance of the bacterium to the body, it goes to the nearby lymph node within hours then it continues to spread in the body. The appearance of that sores usually happens in 2 to 10 weeks following exposure, and chancres, another name for the sores, are red, oval, and painless. Therefore, most of the infected people are not aware of having that disease in its primary stage. The sores may develop into ulcers that secret uncolored, very infectious fluid. The lesions most of the time are healed without treatment in about six, or it will develop into the secondary

Until 1940, doctors could not find a cure for this disease. After that year, doctors discovered a treatment for primary, secondary, and early latent syphilis. The most used antibiotic to treat this affliction is penicillin and it is extremely effective. It only requires a single intramuscular injection of penicillin to those stages, and for those who are allergic to penicillin they can use other antibiotics such as tetracycline, doxycycline and other antibiotics. Those antibiotics are less effective than penicillin. There are some side effects that the patient may suffer after taking the penicillin injection such malaise, anxiety, exacerbated lesions, known for Jarisch-herxheimer reaction. Penicillin can be used to treat patients with latent syphilis, but it cannot revers the damage that had occurred during this