At the Core, Tuskegee Has Never Been Resolved

BY MIKE MAGEE July 25, 1972 was fifty years ago this week and it is a day that all AP Science journalists know by heart. As Monday’s AP banner headline read: “On July 25, 1972, Jean Heller, a reporter on The Associated Press investigative team, then called the Special Assignment Team, broke news that rocked the nation. Based on documents leaked by Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower at the U.S. Public Health Service, the then 29-year-old journalist and the only woman on the team, reported that the federal government let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in order to study the impact of the disease on the human body. Most of the men were denied access to penicillin, even when it became widely available as a cure. A public outcry ensued, and nearly four months later, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” came to an end.” Eight years earlier, a young physician from Detroit, Irwin Schatz, came across a study in a medical journal titled “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis: 30 Years of Observation.”Incredulous, he shot off a letter to the editor: “I am utterly astounded by the fact that physicians allow patients with a potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available.” It was later revealed that Dr. Schatz’s message was read by Anne R. Yobs, one of the US Public Health Service employees who designed the Tuskegee Study, and who wrote to her superior, ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Bill Clinton Elisabeth Holmes Mike Magee Theranos Tuskegee Source Type: blogs