United States Public Health Service - Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in The Black Male

Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in The Black Male

In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male".

The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients' informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term referring to several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years. It has been called "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."

Note that a USPHS physician who took part in the Tuskegee program, John Charles Cutler, was in charge of the US government's syphilis experiments in Guatemala, in which Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, orphaned children, and others were deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually-transmitted diseases from 1946-1948 in order to study the disease, in a project funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. President Clinton apologized to Guatemala for this program in 2010.