The Significance Of The Tuskegee Study

Thesis
The experiment proposed by the U.S. Public Health service to study untreated syphilis in poor African American men in the community of Macon County, Alabama, a disease affecting most of its inhabitants. The ethical aspects of clinical research carried out in humans have differentiating characteristics, from the ethical conditions of the rest of scientific research. The protection of human life and health are the most relevant values and require greater protection, in which experiments have been conducted that have caused pain and unnecessary suffering for many humans. The Tuskegee experiment raises a reflection on the relationship between science, ethics and society.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in
1932, in Macon County (near Tuskegee, Alabama) and which was definitively closed in the years 70. Tuskegee is an Alabama locality, low cultural and development at that time, where the U.S. Public health Service organized a prospective observational study in almost 400 patients with syphilis, black and 200 healthy individuals, to observe the Progression of syphilis if it was not treated, and if racial differences changed the course of the disease, compared with other studies previously published in the white race. In principle, the study was designed in the short term (six to eight months), but subsequently prolonged indefinitely. Patients, of very low cultural level, "were offered a blood test and "free specific treatments" for "Bad Blood", which consisted, for example, of merely diagnostic lumbar punctures by "government physicians." During the first years of the experiment there were no remedies that would have proven to be effective, but in any case, these patients were not administered. Most importantly, from 1943, when penicillin was started to treat syphilis, and especially from 1953, when it was already widely available, with a curative effect of the disease, these patients were kept explicit and deliberately without treatment. The first purposes of the project were to detect and offer medical care and treatment to anyone infected with syphilis. As for the health of the black and poor population, since it received no medical and health care.
Thus, over time, 412 black men suffering from syphilis participate in the study, receive no treatment and are deceived by various strategies, such as financial compensations of fifty dollars that were destined for funeral payments.

Following several of these cases, in 1963, NIH established the first regulations on how to conduct clinical research with human beings, and little by little it was clarified the obligation for all to pass through a specific committee to ensure rights (and the well-being of patients, analyze how consent had been obtained and conduct a global analysis of the risk and benefit balance.
In 1971 the DHEW (Department of Health Education and Welfare) published a document (the institutional Guide to DHEW Policy on Protection of Human subjects) which was known as the "Yellow Book" 4 (by its cover) which included its guidelines and requirements for the realization of Human clinical trials, and comments on how the When the Tuskegee study was published on the cover of the "New York Times", the DHEW designated an ad hoc group to review the study, as well as the Department's policies and procedures for the protection of human beings. What is striking is that the regulation of the DHEW was in force during the last years of the study of Tuskegee, but it had to be a journalist who took the subject to the light, and the experiment was not immediately suspended, but only when they finished the deliberations of This group. In fact, the Panel also recommended that Congress establish "a permanent body with the authority to regulate at least all federally supported research involving human beings." And he mentioned that despite the lessons of Nuremberg, the case of the injection of cancer cells to patients in the "Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital", and the Helsinki Declaration, the supervision of research with subjects and the mechanisms that ensure the Informed consent were still insufficient and new approaches were needed to adequately protect human rights and well-being.equirements should be understood and
applied.