#tuskegee syphilis study

[todaysdocument]

‘(He) just thought it was an "incurable disease." He was booked for Birmingham for "606" shots but "nurse stopped it."’ 

Interview notes from a patient in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 11/1/1972.

Series: Tuskegee Syphilis Study Administrative Records, 1929 - 1972

Record Group 442: Records of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1921 - 2006

Transcription: 

STAFF NOTES - PANEL DOCUMENT 5

prepared by J. Eagle 11/1/72

Interview Notes

Four subjects were interviewed in sequence.

#1

Subject was asked what the study meant to the people involved, how it started, etc.

Subject--Started with a blood test. Clinic met at Shiloh Church. They gave us shots. Nurse (Rivers) came out and took us in (to John Andrews Hospital).

One time I had a spinal puncture--had to stay in bed for 10 days afterward.

Had headaches from that. Several others did too (and stayed in bed awhile).

I wore a rubber belt for a long time afterward. Had ointment to run in under the belt.

Doctors came every year or so. After 25 years they gave everyone in the study $25.00 and a certificate. They told him he was in pretty good health.

At the beginning he thought he had "bad blood". They said that was syphilis.

(He) just thought it was an "incurable disease." He was booked for Birmingham for "606" shots but "nurse stopped it." Some doctor took blood that time and he was signed up to go to Birmingham. Nurse Rivers said he wasn't due to take the shots...he went to get on the bus to Birmingham and they turned him down. This was some time between 1942-1947.

He did not know he was sick before 1932. They gave them a bunch of shots--about once a month. Then they did a spinal. Nurse would notify them about the blood tests and bring them down.

He had not talked to any of the other participants lately.

He had the shots in his arm. In 1961 he had a growth removed from his bladder. (He is 66). Health insurance paid for it. He paid his bill and his insurance paid back all but $20.

Question--could all the people in the group afford hospitalization? What would others have done?

Subject--I don't know. I asked the (government) doctors about it (the growth) and they sent me to my family doctor. The government people didn't know I had insurance.

He didn't know of any others in the study who had been in the hospital although one man had become blind after awhile. He hadn't thought much about whether his disease had been cured. The doctor was seeing him every year, and he was feeling pretty good. He was not told what the disease might do to him. He stayed in the program because they asked him to. Nurse came and got him. He thought they all had the same disease. The blind man had been blind nearly 20 years--had worn glasses awhile, then had become blind.

Question--Did anyone do anything about the blind man's eyes?

Subject--I think he told nurse. They talked one time about sending him somewhere. Wasn't treated that he knew of. He (the blind man) never went anywhere and he (subject) didn't know the details. The blind man is about 75 now.

[ammg-old2]

At age 45, the life expectancy of black men is more than three years less than that of non-Hispanic Caucasian men. According to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, part of the historical black-white mortality difference can be attributed to a 40-year experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service that shook African-Americans’ confidence in the nation’s health system.

From 1932 to 1972, the Public Health Service tracked about 600 hundred low-income African-American men in Tuskegee, Ala., about 400 of whom had syphilis. The stated purpose was to better understand the natural course of the disease. To do so, the men were lied to about the study and provided sham treatments. Many needlessly passed the disease on to family members, suffered and died.

As one scholar put it, the Tuskegee study “revealed more about the pathology of racism than it did about the pathology of syphilis.” In fact, the natural course of syphilis was already largely understood.

The study was publicized in 1972 and immediately halted. To this day, it is frequently cited as a driver of documented distrust in the health system by African-Americans. That distrust has helped compromise many public health efforts — including those to slow the spread of H.I.V., contain tuberculosis outbreaks and broaden provision of preventive care.

According to work by the economists Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker, black men are less likely than white men to seek health care and more likely to die at younger ages. Their analysis suggests that one-third of the black-white gap in male life expectancy in the immediate aftermath of the study could be attributed to the legacy of distrust connected to the Tuskegee study.

Their study relies on interpreting observational data, not a randomized trial, so there is room for skepticism about the specific findings and interpretation. Nevertheless, the findings are consistent with lots of other work that reveals African-Americans’ distrust of the health system, their receipt of less care, and their worse health outcomes.

The Tuskegee study is far from the only unjust treatment of nonwhite groups in health care. Thousands of nonwhite women have been sterilized without consent. For instance, between the 1930s and 1970s, one-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized, many under coercion.

Likewise, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Native American women were sterilized without consent, and a California eugenics law forced or coerced thousands of sterilizations of women (and men) of Mexican descent in the 20th century. (Thirty-two other states have had such laws, which were applied disproportionately to people of color.)

For decades, sickle cell disease, which mostly affects African-Americans, received less attention than other diseases, raising questions about the role of race in how medical research priorities are established.

[blackbackedjackal]

.

[clamorybus]

i don't wanna call that lobotomy tiktok misinfo, because it isn't really, it's just that thing where it's hard to condense history into a 1 minute clip without stripping some context

[odinsblog]

NEW YORK (AP) — Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died. He was 86.

Buxtun died May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California, according to his attorney, Minna Fernan.

Buxtun is revered as a hero to public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in U.S. history. Documents that Buxtun provided to The Associated Press, and its subsequent investigation and reporting, led to a public outcry that ended the study in 1972.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs be withheld. The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time.

In the mid-1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health employee working in San Francisco when he overheard a co-worker talking about the study. The research wasn’t exactly a secret — about a dozen medical journal articles about it had been published in the previous 20 years. But hardly anyone had raised any concerns about how the experiment was being conducted.

“This study was completely accepted by the American medical community,” said Ted Pestorius of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the study.

Buxtun had a different reaction. After learning more about the study, he raised ethical concerns in a 1966 letter to officials at the CDC. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where he was chewed out by agency officials for what they deemed to be impertinence. Repeatedly, agency leaders rejected his complaints and his call for the men in Tuskegee to be treated.

He left the U.S. Public Health Service and attended law school, but the study ate at him. In 1972, he provided documents about the research to Edith Lederer, an AP reporter he had met in San Francisco. Lederer passed the documents to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, telling her colleague, “I think there might be something here.”

Heller’s story was published on July 25, 1972, leading to Congressional hearings, a class-action lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement and the study’s termination about four months later. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, calling it “shameful.”

The leader of a group dedicated to the memory of the study participants said Monday they are grateful to Buxtun for exposing the experiment.

“We are thankful for his honesty and his courage,” said Lille Tyson Head, whose father was in the study.

(continue reading)

[macgyvermedical]

I encountered a drug called "Dextromethorphan" when looking up things that react with grapefruits for a fic. I found out it's been banned in Sweden since the 90s, so I couldn't use it for this specific story, but if you've got any interesting history I'd be happy so know!

Are you ready for this? Like. Ask yourself. Are you really ready for this?

In 1954, a researcher with the US Public Health Service received $282,215 (1954 dollars) from the US Navy, ostensibly to find a non-addictive alternative to an opiate drug called codeine (used for pain and and as a cough suppressant).

So the researcher found a bunch of people who had substance abuse disorder and tested 800 substances on them, trying to find ones that couldn't cause physical or psychological dependence, even on people who were prone to that sort of thing.

(Now, you might be asking if this experiment was ethical. The USPHS was concurrently doing the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, so while I couldn't find any concrete answer, imma guess no.)

Out of these 800 tested substances, we use 3 today: propoxyphene (used as a painkiller), diphenoxylate (used as a diarrhea medication), and dextromethophan (a cough suppressant (and, as of 2022, part of a fast-acting antidepressant)).

Importantly, it was later noted that all of these are addictive substances and today most of them require a prescription. Though depending on where you are in the world, you might just have to be over 21 and show an ID.

You might think this sounds like a pretty standard story.

You would be wrong.

Because while the US Navy was the one handing the money to the USPHS, the US Navy had come by it via the Central Intelligence Agency.

Yes. The good ol' CIA.

So what stake did the CIA have in a non-addictive codeine replacement? Nothing, it turns out. That's just what they'd told the US Navy. What they really wanted was an incapacitant- a drug that causes incapacitation like unconsciousness or continuous hallucinations- without killing. Incapacitants are also useful for discrediting prominent political figures by making them look like they have severe mental health concerns, which was another reason the CIA wanted them.

This was part of a project called MKPILOT.

And wouldn't you like to know which of the three listed above they liked the most? Dextromethorphan. Because at high doses it causes severe- and incapacitating- hallucinations (this is also why it is banned in Sweden).

The problem with it is that it requires really, really high doses (about 3 grams, which would have to be packaged in some other substrate)- this would make it difficult to slip into a drink or food.

(It should be noted that around the same time, the US Army was doing research into a much more usable incapacitant called 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate which required as little as 150mg of the substance to be useful- it was featured in a MacGyver episode and I did a nice little review of it here. While I have no sources that say the CIA was directly involved in funding this, based on their extensive funding of similar DoD projects at the time, they probably did.)

But you wanted to know about how grapefruit interacts with dextromethorphan:

A substance in grapefruit (along with seville oranges, limes, pomelos, and possibly pomegranates) blocks the pathway by which many drugs are metabolized in the liver. This causes the levels of drug in the body to be much higher than expected. In the case of dextromethorphan in particular, it can mean that the drug stays in the body a lot longer- up to 24 hours instead of the usual 3-4 hours. It can also make side effects and toxic effects significantly worse, leading to hallucinations and sedation, even at low doses normally used for coughing.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 25 July 1972, the US government admitted its role in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a horrific 40-year study of poor Black agricultural workers in Alabama who had syphilis but were not informed. Over the course of the study, 128 participants died of syphilis or related complications, 40 wives of participants were infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. The government owned up following leaks to the media about the programme. The resulting public outrage forced the introduction of federal regulation to protect human subjects in medical trials. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9751/tuskegee-experiment-revealed https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=667731932066692&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[australet789]

"learning all the fucked up stuff done in the name of science is super interesting" care to share any examples?

ok, just to clarify, that in my bioethics class we (obviously) revisited cases of my own country, apart from learning all the rules and how very much the majotiy of experiments related to science lack a lot of informed consent, the latter being the one we focused on the most, learning how to do a proper document and to explain it to people, from kids to older adults.

Cases were mostly just mentioned (the Standford Experiment, for example), everything that happened in WW2

But the one we studied and i cried in rage when learning about it?

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

We watched a movie about it, Miss Ever's Boys and had to make a essay about it.

I dont remember feeing so much disgust towards the USA as much as i felt reading everything about that "study" after i watched the movie.

I recommend anyone in the science field to read or watch about that study. It's a slap on the face, and a way to show how much bioethics matter in a field that keeps teaching that we should disengage from the living beings, even when we have "bio" in our names

[sineala]

18+ 616 Steve/Tony Discord Book Club: Captain America: Truth: Red, White & Black (2003)

It's Captain America week for Book Club! And since our last Book Club, Young Avengers, was such a hit with the server, we thought it'd be a good time to read the story of Eli's grandfather, Isaiah Bradley. Truth: Red, White & Black (currently released as Captain America: Truth) is a seven-issue miniseries from 2003 by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker that introduces Isaiah Bradley. If you watched the Falcon and the Winter Soldier show, you've already seen him, but this is his original Marvel Comics debut.

The plot of Truth essentially recasts the Tuskegee Syphilis Study into the 616 universe as WW2 super-soldier serum trials. None of the subjects are told what's going on, and there are only a handful of survivors. Isaiah is one of them. Isaiah is sent on a suicide mission (for which he steals Steve's uniform) that would definitely have killed him if he hadn't had the serum, and he gets captured by the Nazis. This is not as bad as what the US government does to him when he gets back.

Steve knew about none of this, and there's a framing story where, in the present day, he finds out that all of this has been happening, and he gets to meet Isaiah.

It's a very serious story and it's not an easy read; it's an unflinching look at racism in the past and present. But it's definitely worth reading.

Come join us on You Gave Me A Home, an 18+ comics Steve/Tony Discord server!

(We are now once again a Level 3 boosted server, thanks to our Nitro members, and that means our URL is once again discord.gg/stevetony. Previous book clubs are also always on topic so if you missed YA v1 you can come read it now. And you should, because YA is really good.)

[brownskinsugarplum76]

Peter Buxtun, whistleblower who exposed Tuskegee syphilis study, dies aged 86 | US news | The Guardian

[vomitdodger]

About the same time as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and crimes against humanity. What a coincidence!!

And no one was ever held accountable for those crimes either! Not a single person.

[longliveblackness]

Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Acting on the presumption that rural southern blacks were generally more promiscuous and syphilitic than whites, and without sufficient funding to establish an effective treatment program for them, doctors working with the Public Health Service (PHS) commenced a multi-year experiment in 1932.

Their actions deprived 400 largely uneducated and poor African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama of proper and reasonable treatment for syphilis, a disease whose symptoms could easily have been relieved with the application of penicillin which became available in the 1940s.

Patients were not told they had syphilis nor were they provided sufficient medication to cure them. More than 100 men died due to lack of treatment while others suffered insanity, blindness and chronic maladies related to the disease.

The original experiment took on a life of its own as physicians, intrigued by the prospect of gathering scientific data, ignored human rights and ethical considerations and managed to extend it until 1972 when a PHS researcher Peter Buxtun revealed its history to the press. Public exposure embarrassed the scientific community and the government and the experiment was quickly shut down.

Attorney Fred Gray initiated a lawsuit on behalf of the patients. In an out-of-court settlement each surviving patient received medical treatment and $40,000 in compensation.

In the wake of the scandal Congress passed the National Research Act of 1974 which required more stringent oversight of studies employing human subjects.

In 1997, on behalf of the federal government, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology to the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

•••

Experimento de Tuskegee (Sífilis)

Actuando bajo la presunción de que los negros en las áreas rurales del sur eran generalmente mas promiscuos y sifilíticos que los blancos, y sin tener los fondos suficientes para establecer un programa de tratamiento efectivo, los doctores que trabajaban para el Servicio de Salud Publica comenzaron un experimento que duró varios años en el año 1932.

Sus acciones privaron a cuatrocientos afroamericanos de un tratamiento adecuado y razonable para el sífilis, una enfermedad cuyos síntomas podrían haberse aliviado fácilmente con la aplicación de penicilina, la cual estuvo disponible en la década de 1940.

A los pacientes no se les dijo que tenían sífilis, tampoco se les brindó suficiente medicamento para curarlos. Mas de cien hombres fallecieron debido a la falta de medicamento, mientras que otros sufrían demencia, ceguera y otras enfermedades crónicas relacionadas con la enfermedad.

El experimento original cobró vida propia cuando los médicos, intrigados por la perspectiva de recopilar datos científicos, ignoraron los derechos humanos y las consideraciones éticas y lograron extenderlo hasta 1972 En este año es cuando un investigador del Servicio de Salud Pública, Peter Buxtun, reveló su historia a la prensa. La exposición pública avergonzó a la comunidad científica y al gobierno y el experimento fue rápidamente cancelado.

El abogado Fred Gray inició una demanda en nombre de los pacientes. En un acuerdo extrajudicial, cada paciente que sobrevivió, recibió tratamiento médico y 40,000 dólares de indemnización.

A raíz del escándalo, el Congreso aprobó la Ley de Investigación Nacional de 1974, que exige una supervisión más estricta de los estudios que utilizan sujetos humanos.

En 1997, en nombre del gobierno federal, el presidente Bill Clinton emitió una disculpa formal a las víctimas del Experimento de Sífilis de Tuskegee.

[black-paraphernalia]

         FOR JAMES MARION A RACIST BUTCHER

The ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women. His use of Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. by Brynn Holland

This post is a summary excerpts from History.com - click above title for the article in its entirety 

Few medical doctors have been as lauded—and loathed—as James Marion Sims. Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks.

Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.Sims, who practiced medicine at a time when treating women was considered distasteful and rarely done, invented the vaginal speculum, a tool used for dilation and examination. He also pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a common 19th-century complication of childbirth in which a tear between the uterus and bladder caused constant pain and urine leakage.

Today, we know three of the names of the female fistula patients from Sims’s owns records—Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. The first one he operated on was 18-year-old Lucy, who had given birth a few months prior and hadn’t been able to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were completely naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward onto their elbows so their heads rested on their hands. 

Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain, as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became extremely ill due to his controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led her to contract blood poisoning. “I thought she was going to die… It took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation,” he wrote.

For a long time, Sims’ fistula surgeries were not successful. After 30 operations on one woman, a 17-year-old enslaved woman named Anarcha who had had a very traumatic labor and delivery, he finally “perfected” his method—after four years of experimentation. Afterward, he began to practice on white women, using anesthesia, which was new to the medical field at the time.

While some doctors didn’t trust anesthesia, Sims’ decision to not use it—or any other numbing technique—was based on his misguided belief that Black people didn’t experience pain like white people did. It’s a notion that persists today, according to a study conducted at the University of Virginia, and published in the April 4, 2016 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Experimenting on Enslaved Children

Writer and medical ethicist Harriet Washington says Sims’s racist beliefs affected more than his gynecological experiments. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved Black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success.

Sims also believed that African Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on African American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls.

In the 1850s, Sims moved to New York and opened the first-ever Woman’s Hospital, where he continued testing controversial medical treatments on his patients. When any of Sims’s patients died, the blame, according to him, lay squarely with “the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.” He did not believe anything was wrong with his methods.

Sims’ practices ignited controversy during his lifetime, says Washington. The medical community debated his methods, and some of his white colleagues even openly objected to his experiments, saying he took things too far.

After several years of activism, the Philadelphia statue was moved into storage and the statue in Central Park was removed on April 17, 2018. Its plaque was to be replaced by one that educates the public on the origins of the monument and the controversial, non-consensual medical experiments Sims used on women of color. The names (and histories) of the three known women “whose bodies were used in the name of medical and scientific advancement” by Sims, Lucy, Anarcha and Betsey, were to be recognized on the new plaque.

It's a recognition some see as overdue. In a 1941 paper titled “The Negro’s Contribution to Surgery,” published in the Journal of the National Medical Association, Dr. John A. Kenney of the Tuskegee Institute, considered the dean of Black dermatology, wrote, “I suggest that a monument be raised and dedicated to the nameless Negroes who have contributed so much to surgery by the ‘guinea pig’ route.”

Lucy

Anarcha

Betsey

BLACK PARAPHERNALIA DISCLAIMER -PLEASE READ

[fakerobotrealblog]

The term "unknown history" of the United States often refers to lesser-known or less emphasized aspects of the nation's past that might not receive as much attention in mainstream historical narratives. Here are a few examples:

1. **Indigenous History:**

The history and rich cultures of Native American tribes often receive less attention in traditional education. Exploring the history, traditions, and struggles of indigenous peoples provides a deeper understanding of the diverse tapestry that predates European colonization.

2. **Japanese Internment during World War II:**

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a chapter in U.S. history that was once downplayed. It involved the forced relocation and incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens, based on fears of espionage and sabotage.

3. **COINTELPRO:**

The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) is a less-known part of U.S. history. It was aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. COINTELPRO targeted various groups, including civil rights activists and anti-war protestors.

4. **Eugenics Movement:**

The eugenics movement in the early 20th century advocated for selective breeding to improve the genetic quality of the human population. While often associated with Nazi Germany, eugenics also had a presence in the United States, influencing policies such as forced sterilization laws.

5. **Redlining and Housing Discrimination:**

The practice of redlining, where certain neighborhoods were marked as high-risk based on racial demographics, led to systemic discrimination in housing loans. This discriminatory practice has had lasting effects on wealth disparities and community development.

6. **Tuskegee Syphilis Study:**

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is a dark chapter where the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a decades-long experiment on African American men with syphilis. The men were not informed of their diagnosis and were denied treatment, even after penicillin became a recognized cure.

7. **Operation Paperclip:**

Operation Paperclip remains relatively unknown to many. After World War II, the U.S. recruited German scientists, including some with Nazi affiliations, to work on American projects, contributing to advancements in science and technology.

It's important to note that exploring the unknown or less commonly discussed aspects of U.S. history enriches our understanding of the nation's complex past. Diverse perspectives contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced view of historical events and their impact on society.

[thoughtportal]

undefined

Negro Battle Royal - https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2014/may.htm

American Indian boarding schools - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

Tuskegee Syphilis Study - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tuskegee-syphilis-study-part-1-the-lie/id1380008439?i=1000490510511

Redlining - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining