Tuskegee Syphilis Case

The Tuskegee Syphilis Case Study is an important historical event that has influenced current ethical guidelines and regulations with the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This Case Study was a prime example of how the United States violated the rights and welfare of human test subjects. This study was designed in the year 1932, by the United States Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama. Which studied black males with a natural history of untreated syphilis in the early 1930s this case study was supposed to last a few months but ended up becoming a long-term study until the year 1972. This study enrolled 600 African-American men; 400 with the disease and 200 as a control group. They were all told that they were

One of which was failure of trust; investigator and subjects trust should be at 100% in throughout the research process, however, starting from the beginning and lasting throughout the study subjects were not told they had syphilis and they were not treated for syphilis or any other medical problem they may have been facing. Another was the lack of consent or informed consent, so once after penicillin became the standard treatment for syphilis, researchers did not administer the cure, until discovered in 1972, when a public health official went to the press with this unlawful case study. (The Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Ethics in Mental Health Research). By 1936, it was apparent that much more infected men than controls had developed complications, and 10 years later, reports indicated that the death rate among those with syphilis was about twice as high as it was among the controls. (Protecting Human Subject Research Participants). This led to many predicted untreated syphilis until death, historian James Jones described as "the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history," (Neither Victim nor Villain: Nurse Eunice

If I was a researcher with the main goal to understand everything, maybe but I am not. I will not try to help them or other people who could later be affected by a disease that later can be treated unless all possibilities were explored and there is not a treatment. To watch someone suffer or die is unethical to me and it would be worse if participants were compensated for participation because nothing was done or tried to help cure them. If data was collected on how the known or unknown disease is contracted, spread, multiplied in the human system, processed, functioning, living, advanced and evolved, then later understood and nothing can be done, I would be okay with that because everything was tired. But if all that was done and there was no reason to find a cure, I want no part of the