The infamous Tuskegee “experiment” 

In U.S. society, medical intervention goes far beyond the use of pills, bandages, and surgery; in the name of public health we remove asbestos and lead-based paint and treat water.  Given the medical consensus that has emerged on the effectiveness of sterile needles as a way to avoid the spread of injection-related AIDS, it is difficult to see the denial of access to sterile needles as anything other than the denial of access to a lifesaving medical intervention.

In the history of modern medicine in the United States, there is only one other instance where a lifesaving medical intervention involving the spread of a deadly infectious disease was deliberately denied a group of people.⁽¹⁾  That instance is the infamous Tuskegee syphilis “experiment.”  The originators justified themselves by saying they wanted to study the course of untreated syphilis.  The unfortunate victims of this study were 400 black men from Alabama, who were denied medical treatment for their syphilis from 1932, when the study began, until their deaths or, if they lived, until 1972, when the “experiment” was exposed and stopped. ^{(2), (3)}

Footnotes

(1) The viewpoint that denial of access to sterile needles is the denial of access to medical care, and is comparable to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in this regard, was first made by Dawn Day in Health emergency: the spread of drug-related AIDS among African Americans and Latinos. October 1995; 24 pages. 

(2) J.H. Jones. 1993. Bad blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. 2nd edition. New York: Free Press. 

Writing about the continuing aftermath of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as well as other more recent events, Sandra Crouse Quinn of the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina comments that “belief in genocide, accompanied by distrust of government reports on AIDS, may be contributing to continuing transmission of HIV by maintaining a social environment steeped in denial and contributing to lack of social support for use of condoms, needle exchange programs, and participation in clinical trials.  Sandra Crouse Quinn, “Belief in AIDS as a Form of Genocide:  Implications for HIV Prevention Programs for African Americans,” Journal of Health Education, November/December Supplement 1997, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. S6-S11.     

See also Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Eyes Shut, Black American Is Being Ravaged by AIDS,”  New York Times,  June 29, 1998, p. A1.   

Stephen B. Thomas, "The Legacy of Tuskegee: AIDS and African Americans," Body Positive, January/February 2000.

Stephen B. Thomas and James W. Curran, "Tuskegee: from science to conspiracy to metaphor," American Journal of the Medical Sciences," January 1999, vol. 317, no. 1, pages 1-4.

Giselle Corbie-Smith, "The continuing legacy of the Tuskegee syphilis study: considerations for clinical investigation," American Journal of the Medical Sciences," January 1999, vol. 317, no. 1, pages 5-8.

(3) In May 1997, President Clinton apologized to the survivors and their families for the federal government’s 40-year role in creating, funding, and running the experiment. Carol Kaesuk Yoon. 1997. “Families emerge as silent victims of Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” New York Times, May 12, p. 1.

For a list of other materials used on this website, see References.