US apologizes for ’40s syphilis study in Guatemala

WASHINGTON – American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research.” However, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the most horrendous examples of research carried out in disregard of basic ethical principles of conduct. The publicity surrounding the study was one of the major influences leading to the codification of protection for human subjects.

In 1928, the director of medical services for the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago-based charity, approached the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) to consider ways to improve the health of African Americans in the South. At the time, the PHS had just finished a study of the prevalence of syphilis among black employees of the Delta Pine and Land Company of Mississippi. About 25% of the sample of over 2000 had tested positive for syphilis.

The PHS and the Rosenwald fund collaborated in treating these individuals. Subsequently, the treatment program was expanded to include five additional counties in the southern U.S.: Albemarle County, Virginia; Glynn County, Georgia; Macon County, Alabama; Pitt County, North Carolina; and Tipton County, Tennessee (Jones, 1981).

During the set-up phase of the treatment program, the Great Depression began. The Rosenwald Fund was hit hard and had to withdraw its support. Without the Rosenwald Fund, the PHS did not have the resources to implement treatment.

During this period, there was a debate occurring in health circles about possible racial variation in the effects of syphilis. Dr. Taliaferro Clark of the PHS suggested that the project could be partially “salvaged” by conducting a prospective study on the effects of untreated syphilis on living subjects. Clark’s suggestion was adopted.

In the beginning stages of the project, the PHS enlisted the support of the Tuskegee Institute. Since the Tuskegee Institute had a history of service to local African Americans, its participation increased the likelihood of the “success” of the experiment. In return, Tuskegee Institute received money, training for its interns, and employment for its nurses. In addition, the PHS recruited black church leaders, community leaders, and plantation owners to encourage participation.

At the time of the project, African Americans had almost no access to medical care. For many participants, the examination by the PHS physician was the first health examination they had ever received. Along with free health examinations, food and transportation were supplied to participants. Thus, it was not difficult to recruit African American men as participants in the study. Burial stipends were used to get permission from family members to perform autopsies on study participants (Jones, 1981).

While study participants received medical examinations, none were told that they were infected with syphilis.

Tiger,I’ll be back!

Donna Brazile added, “He let down his fans, he let down his family, he apologized, but actions speak louder than words.” Tiger’s reply

Return of the mack

Tiger’s  achievements to date rank him among the most successful golfers of all time.  He aims for consistency.  Tiger is better than any other Tour player.  I look forward to seeing Tiger on the course again.

The Center for Disease Control

 The Center for Disease Control (CDC) (which by then controlled the Tuskegee syphilis study) reaffirmed the need to continue the study until completion (until all subjects had died and been autopsied). Considerations were limited from the start, and rapidly deteriorated. For example, to ensure that the men would show up for the possibly dangerous, painful, diagnostic and non-therapeutic spinal tap , the doctors sent the 400 patients a misleading letter titled, “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment”. The study also required all participants to undergo anautospy after death—in order to receive funeral benefits. After penicillin was discovered as a cure, researchers continued to deny such treatment to many study participants. Many patients were lied to and given placebo treatments— so that researchers could observe the progression of the fatal disease. In 1934, the Tuskegee Study published its first clinical data, and issued their first major report in 1936. This was prior to the discovery of penicillin as a treatment for syphilis. The study was not secret; it issued several published reports and data sets appeared throughout its duration.

By 1947 penicillin had become standard therapy for syphilis. The US government sponsored several public health programs to form “rapid treatment centers” to eradicate the disease. When campaigns to eradicate venereal disease came to Macon County, however, study researchers prevented their patients from participating. During World War II, 250 of the subject men registered for the draft . They were consequently diagnosed and ordered to obtain treatment for syphilis before they could be taken into the armed services.

PHS researchers prevented them from getting treatment, thus depriving them of chances for a cure, service to the nation, and gaining the benefit of the GI Bill for education, passed after the war. At the time, the PHS representative was quoted as saying: “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treatment.”

By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. Twenty-eight of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

first African-American child

The Presidential Citizens Medal was established on November 13, 1969, by Executive Order 11494. The medal is awarded by the President of the United States in recognition of U.S. citizens who have performed exemplary deeds of service for our nation. The medal may be bestowed by the President upon any citizen of the United States and may be conferred posthumously. 

Monday, January 8, 2001

 President Clinton  presented  the Presidential Citizens Medal to  Ruby Bridges-Hall.

On November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges made history as she was flung into the vortex of a war she hadn’t started, and was too young to even comprehend. But she was certainly old enough to feel it. A pawn in the game of civil rights, and a pivotal image marking the start of the desegregation of public schools in the US, Ruby bravely walked through a crowd of raised fists and jeering faces pelting her with insults, to become the first African-American child to attend a public school in Louisiana.

The mob mentality escalated as the little 6-year-old girl was escorted by federal marshals up the steps into the school. She didn’t flinch. She later said that the noise was, to her, no louder than Mardi Gras.

She spent that entire first day in the principal’s office with her mother listening to the mob outside, and watched as the other mothers grabbed their childrens’ hands and took them from the building in protest.

father of the American Civil Rights Movement

Vernon Johns (April 22, 1892 – June 11, 1965) African- American minister and civil rights leader who was active in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans from the 1920s. He is considered the father of the American Civil Rights Movement, having laid the foundation on which Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would build. He was Dr. King’s predecessor as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1947 to 1952, and a mentor of Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker, and many others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The three great pushes for civil rights in the United States were the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. campaign against Jim Crow in the North, the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. attack on segregation in the South. Few people realize this, but the one man who influenced all three events was Vernon Johns.

Vernon Johns himself was a victim of a politically correct code. After all, he was constantly violating the code. He was a man who said what others were afraid to say. While inspiring the few, his words made most of his listeners uncomfortable, and this in turn would anger them. After all, people don’t like to feel uncomfortable. But it was Vernon Johns’s mission to break this sense of comfortableness

Success

Robert L. “Bob” Johnson (born April 8, 1946) is an African -American businessman and founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), and is also its former chairman and chief executive officer. Johnson is currently chairman and founder of RLJ Development and majority-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats,   National Basketball Association franchise along with rapper Nelly and NBA legend Michael Jordan. In 2001 Johnson became the first African American billionaire, and the first black person to be listed on any of Forbes world’s rich list.

first in his class

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.Marshall graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore in 1925 and from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930. Afterward, Marshall wanted to apply to his hometown law school, the University of Maryland School of Law, but the dean told him that he would not be accepted because of the school’s segregation policy. Later, as a civil rights litigator, he successfully sued the school for this policy in the case of Murray v. Pearson. As he could not attend the University of Maryland, Marshall sought admission and was accepted at Howard University School of Law. Marshall received his law degree from the Howard University School of Law in 1933 where he graduated first in his class. He then set up a private practice in Baltimore. The following year, he began working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Baltimore. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, 169 Md. 478 (1936). This involved the first attempt to chip away at the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a plan created by his co-counsel on the case Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall represented Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College graduate with excellent credentials who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of its separate but equal policies.

Education

Ruth Jean Simmons (born July 3, 1945) is the 18th and current president of Brown University and the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution. Simmons was elected Brown’s first woman president in November 2000. Simmons assumed office in fall of 2001. Simmons holds appointments as a professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies. In 2002, Newsweek selected her as a Ms. Woman of the Year, while in 2001, Time named her as America’s best college president.

According to a March 2009 poll by The Brown Daily Herald, Simmons enjoys a more than 80% approval rating among Brown undergraduates.

Hero of Medicine.

Keith L. Black (born September 13, 1957) is an African- American neurosurgeon specialising in the treatment of brain tumors and a prolific campaigner for funding of cancer treatment. He is chairman of the neurosurgery department and director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute atCedars-Sinail Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

Black has been a frequent subject of media reports on medical advances in neurosurgery. He was featured in a 1996 episode of the PBS program The New Explorers entitled “Outsmarting the Brain”. Esquire  included him in its November 1999 “Genius Issue” as one of the “21 Most Important People of the 21st Century.”

 He has been cited as an expert in reports about whether mobile phone affects the incidence use  of brain tumors.  He is also noted for his very busy surgery schedule:   a 2004 Discover article noted that he performs about 250 brain surgeries per year, and that at age 46 he had “already performed more than 4,000 brain surgeries, the medical equivalent of closing in on baseball’s all-time career hits record.

  (As of 2009, Black’s surgery count had risen to “more than 5,000 operations for resection of brain tumors”.)

In 1997, Time magazine featured Black on the cover of a special edition called “Heroes of Medicine”.  The accompanying article described Black’s reputation as a surgeon who would operate on tumors that other doctors would not, as well as aspects of his medical research, including his discovery that the peptide bradykinin can be effective in opening the blood -brain barrier.