Re: INFORMED CONSENT

[nobody@rosebud.ee.uh.edu]

Sandy Sandfort <ssandfort@attmail.com> writes:

S> Nobody wrote:
S> 
S>     You know, this radiation experiment reminds me of
S>     another incident. A group of African-American men were
S>     injected, without their knowledge or consent, with live
S>     syphilis spirochaetes, and studied for a number of
S>     years.  No attempt at therapy was ever attempted, as I
S>     recall, for these individuals. . . .
S> 
S> Actually, this is wrong on two counts.  One, the men were not
S> injected with syphilis; they had already contracted it when
S  they went into the program.

Correct. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

S> Two, in most cases, they *were* given
S> therapy.  What was withheld was penicillin.  The subjects who
S> were treated, were given relatively ineffective and dangerous
S> mercury therapies.

From what I've been able to glean from the below reference, at
the very beginning of the study, in 1932, the subjects were given
rather innefective treatment.  From about 1933 on the focus of
the study became purely one of longterm _untreated_ syphilis. 
Indeed, during United States Public Health Service campaigns
against V.D. in the South, during the late '30s and into the '40s
when more effective therapies were coming into use, subjects of
the study were actively *denied* treatment; to the point of
actually pulling them out line at clinics (those who sought
treatment), telling them that they weren't supposed to be
treated, and sending them home.

This "study" was conducted under the auspices of the United
States Public Health Service, was not a secret, and ran for
40 years.

--Nobody
==================================================================

 Author: Jones, James H. (James Howard), 1943-
  Title: Bad blood : the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
Impr/Ed: New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan 
         Canada; New York : Maxwell McMillan International, c1993
       : LCCN: 92034818