50 Years After Tuskegee, How Is the Race Gap in Health Care Getting Worse?

Fifty years ago today (July 25), the Associated Press pulled the curtain back on the infamous Tuskegee Study.

U.S. Public Health Service doctors had been withholding treatment from hundreds of Black men with syphilis for 40 years. Worse, the doctors, who wanted to study the consequences of untreated syphilis, lied to their patients— telling them they had “bad blood” (a colloquial term often used to describe anemia, fatigue, and other conditions), and administering vitamins, iron tonics, diagnostic spinal taps and other fake “treatments.” The researchers tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to keep the study’s subjects from receiving appropriate care over the years.

Reports about the study appeared in medical journals over the decades, but only a handful of health practitioners tried to stop it. But the study did not end until four months after Jean Heller’s AP story appeared. By then only 74 of the 399 original subjects were still alive; 128 had died of syphilis or its complications, 40 of their wives or sexual partners were known to have been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. Today, all of the men and their wives have died; the Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation represents their descendants.

Read more at The Daily Beast.