"Bad Blood"
A
doctor tells an individual you have “Bad Blood” and he would treat you for it
for free? Throw in the fact that this individual has never had medical care
before. Sounds like a great plan. This is want six hundred low-income African
Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama said yes to. Unknowing that all most two hundred
of them didn’t have the disease and the four hundred that did would never be
cured and most likely would die from the disease called syphilis.
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| This is the marketing the government used to get individuals to come to the Tuskegee Study. |
Syphilis
is a sexual transmitted disease that slowly eats away at an individuals’ body
and mind. Within 10 days to 3 months of being exposed to syphilis, an
individual will notice lymph nodes near their groin are enlarged. The first
sign of syphilis are small painless sores called “chancre”. Within 2 to 10
weeks after the first sore appears, an individual may experience Skin rash,
sores in the mouth, fever, swollen glands, weight loss, hair loss, headaches,
fatigue, and muscle aches. When syphilis is not treated it becomes very deadly.
Ten to thirty years after the initial infection, an individual may experience brain
problems, stroke, inflammation and infection around the brain and spinal cord,
numbness, deafness, visual problems or blindness, personality changes,
dementia, heart valve disease, aneurysms, and inflammation of blood vessels. In
the end untreated syphilis doesn’t only destroy your body it is a slow and
painful death because you lose your what makes you who you are, such as your hearing
or eye sight, personality and memory.
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| This is a picture of one of the doctor taking blood from one of the participants. |
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| This is a way the doctors used x-rays to see the effect of this disease on the 600 men. |
In
1495, the first documented case of syphilis was reported in Europe. In the time
past there was many reported deaths from syphilis and what happened to their
bodies and minds from the disease. Tuskegee Syphilis was not needed to find the
effects of syphilis because the effects of this disease have been studied and
witnessed for hundreds of years. This study was just an unnecessary and hurtful
to the African American Community. This
study was used to show a scientific different between whites and blacks, where
there is none.
In the experiment, first appealed to low-class African American sharecroppers because of the offer of free medical care. Of the 600 men, 399 had syphilis and 201 didn’t not have it. The men weren’t informed of the details or name of the disease they were just told they were being treated for bad blood. This violates the first principle of The Nuremberg Code where it states that “before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made know to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is conduced.” A forty-yearlong study was not mentioned when the subjects were being offered free medical checks, free food, free transportation and burial insurance. No talk of the painful spinal taps and blood tests they would interval. In 1947, penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis but the men were not given any but instead were given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplement. It wasn’t until July 1972 that the experiment was shut down after 28 participants had pasted after from syphilis and 100 more had passed from related complications, at least 40 wives had been diagnosed and had been passed down to 19 children.
This
unprofessional experiment will never be right scientifically or morally, but
the government tried their best by rewarding the families of the experiment
with out-of-court settlement of ten million dollar. President Bill Clinton also apologized for the
United States government on the unjust study. The repercussions of this study continue
to be felt. The African Americans continues there distrusting the medical community.
The experiment has seen as like the experiments the Nazis conducted on the Jews
in the concentration camps. People
believe that the doctors and nurses that worked on this study should face repercussions
to their actions, but had not because of their African heritage.
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| This is the President at the time Bill Clinton apologizing to the few survivors of the The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. |
Video documentary of the Tuskegee Experiment:
Work Cited
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