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Alumbrado -> RE: Does Obama have the Democratic Nomination? (6/2/2008 4:47:38 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Estring
The government did not infect black men with syphilis. They took in men who already were infected and under the guise of free health care, did nothing but observe the progression of the disease in these men. They wanted to prove their theory that syphilis affected black men differently than white men.
It was still quite a heinous act, but the facts are the facts.
Unless of course you continue to cherry pick the facts to promote a false conclusion...
In the real world, this is what happened:
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Story.asp?s=1207586
...These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness.
...Although the PHS touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.”
By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science?
Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study
One of the most chilling aspects of the experiment was how zealously the PHS kept these men from receiving treatment. When several nationwide campaigns to eradicate venereal disease came to Macon County, the men were prevented from participating. Even when penicillin —the first real cure for syphilis— was discovered in the 1940s, the Tuskegee men were deliberately denied the medication.
During World War II, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were consequently ordered to get treatment for syphilis, only to have the PHS exempt them. Pleased at their success, the PHS representative announced: “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treatment.” The experiment continued in spite of the Henderson Act (1943), a public health law requiring testing and treatment for venereal disease, and in spite of the World Health Organization's Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which specified that “informed consent” was needed for experiments involving human beings.
The Legacy of Tuskegee
In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.
Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone.
And apparently Reverend Wright was one of those not surprised....
Feel free to keep denying it all you want, facts are facts...and the real facts are those above, and they verify those cited by Wright when he was asked if the US government were capable of deliberately infecting black people.
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