Today is the anniversary…of one chapter in American History…that we should NEVER FORGET…!!!
On July 25, 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.
Yeah, this is a big fucking deal. The ramifications of this experiment (and others like it) won’t ever go away. They’re still being felt and will continue to forever.
The government intentionally infected PoC with a disease — and I cannot emphasize this enough — for which there is no cure.
That means it will affect these people and their descendants (who by the way have NEVER BEEN COMPENSATED for being treated like guinea pig test subjects) forever.
This is why you can’t say racism is over.
This is why no one can say we’re post racial.
Until we make things right and go for true equality, starting with things like this.
The general consensus is that the government didn’t infect anyone (not that they haven’t before), but that they didn’t tell any of the men who had syphilis anything about their health. They told all the men (some of whom did not have syphilis, but might have had other illnesses) that they were being treated for “bad blood,” when in fact they were receiving no treatment at all.
At the time that the study began, there was no known cure for syphilis; however, by the late 1940s penicillin was standard. The researchers still did not tell the men that they had syphilis, and definitely did not give them a treatment that was by then known to be effective. Instead, they studied the progression of the disease and stood back while these men infected others, primarily their own Black loved ones (infants can be born with congenital syphilis), and often eventually died of it. (Also worth noting is that when syphilis has progressed, treatment can slow/stop that progression, but cannot undo the damage it’s already done to the body.)
They continued to do this until 1972, a full 25 years after a cure for syphilis was known, and only stopped because word was leaked to the media and by this time, it made them look bad to enough people that they knew they had to.
(via popelizbet)
