TUSKEGEE STUDY

Tuskegee Study

Tuskegee Study

Introduction

The Tuskegee Study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, included 616 participants (412 infected with syphilis and 204 controls). The study participants were low-income African American males in Macon County, Alabama, a poor community with a high prevalence of the disease. The purpose of the study was to assess the course of untreated syphilis in African American males and to compare it with that noted in the Oslo, Norway, Study (1929), a retrospective study of untreated primary and secondary syphilis in whites, which was conducted at a time when minimal treatment and no cure was available for syphilis.

Other purposes of the Tuskegee Study included raising the public's consciousness of the problem of syphilis, maintaining the momentum of public health work in the area by sustaining cooperative arrangements among state and local governments and the Tuskegee Institute medical personnel, and standardization and developing invention of serologic tests for syphilis (White, 2008).

Process of Patient Consent

Data for the Tuskegee study were collected from the autopsies of the men who died. The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed. In exchange for the men's participation in the experiment, the Public Health Service offered them free physical examinations, free rides to and from the clinics, hot meals on examination days, and a fifty-dollar burial stipend (Sales, 2006).

It was not only white doctors that participated in conducting the study; many local black doctors participated as well. A black nurse, Eunice Rivers, was a central figure in the experiment for most of its forty years. The study's name came from Tuskegee Institute, a school for African Americans founded by black educator Booker T. Washington. A hospital affiliated with the institute lent the Public Health Service its medical facilities for the study.

The men participating in the Tuskegee experiment were zealously kept from treatment and prevented from participating in nationwide campaigns aimed at eradicating venereal disease. Even when penicillin, the first real cure for syphilis, was discovered in the 1940s, the Tuskegee men were deliberately denied the new medication (Jones, 2006). The Public Health Service also exempted the men from getting treatment for syphilis when 250 of them went to register for the draft during World War II.

The Tuskegee experiment continued even after passage of the Henderson Act (1943), a health law that required testing and treatment for venereal disease. It also continued in spite of the World Health Organization's Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which specified that “informed consent” was needed for experiments involving human beings.

Benefits to the Patients and Professionals

As a result of the Tuskegee Study, the National Research Act of 1974 was passed by the U.S. Congress. The act led to the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. In 1978, the Commission released The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects. The report recommended three principles that should guide research on human subjects: beneficence, personal respect, and justice (Corbie, ...