Abuse in Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments (1932-1972)

The Tuskegee syphilis study symbolizes the most offensive abuse of authority on the part of medical researchers. It has come to serve as a point of reference for African Americans distrustful of those with power.  It is important to point out that none of the incentives given to the study subjects were enough to mitigate the social injustice to these vulnerable people has been submitted. Tuskegee is a symbol of research abuse and racial oppression. Researchers and physicians involved in Tuskegee lured men to the study and withheld the treatment watching the die for further and post-mortem autopsies and studies goals.

Scientists infected four hundred black males with syphilis to conduct experiments without any informed consent. This infamous study executed with federal funds has been considered as an abuse committed against impoverished black people for almost forty years. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot point out “They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them” (50). Even though patients were being infected with a terrible disease, doctors didn’t intend to cure them. They were interested in the experiment success not on black people’s health. Doctors had a marked interest in the degeneration and post-mortem to watch the behavior of syphilis; a high price in the name of science. By the time the study was canceled hundreds of men were dead and a few wives and kids were already infected.

Participants in the study were the most vulnerable part of the population. Black minorities were easy to enroll due to their limited knowledge and unprivileged level in society. The subjects were offered what they never dreamed, medical care, rides to and from clinics, meals, certificates of appreciation, and burial expenses, but they were only alerted about having “bad blood,” a local term to describe several illnesses. In 1932, Syphilis diseases became an epidemic in the rural south communities of the United States. The US Health Service decided to conduct this reasearch on the black population of Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama. In Syphilis Study: The Real Study and Beyond, Fred Gray states, “It was not until the summer of 1972 that the surviving participants learned through the news media that they were part of the Tuskegee Study. From the time the study started in 1932 until this disclosure, the public in Macon County generally had absolutely no knowledge about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment” (74). Scientists committed many abuses, such as misinforming patients, conducting potentially dangerous experiments without consent, recruiting healthy people to infect them with a terrible disease and not providing the adequate treatment risking them to die.

The subjects didn’t receive medical care even though penicillin was already developed a decade after the experiment started. Patients were deprive from any kind of possible cure or treatment because what doctors really pursued was their post-mortem not their well being. The abuse in this experiment couldn’t be justified just by saying they were pursuing the wellbeing and science development. Several participants did indicate a belief that the Tuskegee syphilis study represented the way things used to be and that improvements had to be made. However, virtually none of the participants could specifically identify steps that have been taken to improve the protection subjects.

On the other hand, Eunice Rivers, an Afro-American Nurse who coordinated the Tuskegee Syphilis Study for the forty years it existed, didn’t think such experiments were an abuse.  She believed that the benefits of the study to men outweighed the risks. She was aware the subjects of the study didn’t receivetreatment for syphilis, but she explained that those people got all kinds of examinations and medical care they never would havegotten, Susan L. Smith in Neither Victim Nor Villain, quotes Miss Rivers saying, “I’ve taken them over to the hospital and they’d have a gastrointestinal series on them, the heart, the lung, just everything. It was just impossible for just an ordinary person to get that kind of examination” (95).

Ironically, Eunice Rivers had not remorse of what she did, all the opposite, she was strongly convinced that she had helped those men to receive medical care, but she didn’t state why those men were infected in first place.  The damage wouldn’t been so deplorable if they would have enrolled subjects with the disease already and offered a long term care and well being for their family after dead, as long as they would have accepted. In Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, James Jones declares TSS as a tragedy of race and medicine. “No scientific experiment inflicted more damage on the collective psyque of blacks Americans than the Tuskegee study” (797). All doctors and physicians including Nurse Rivers, who worked on the experiment, claimed they were receiving someone else’s order, so who is to blame for the damage done to all these men and his descendants.

As a consequence, most people agree the biggest abuse came from medical researchers, becoming a point of reference for African Americans distrustful of those with power. People need to understand the story of what happened during those forty years in Alabama to understand the abuse committed to those individuals;  First, the enrollment of a vulnerable population into a research, whether doctors infected them or they were already infected, into an experiment without an informed consent. Second, exploitation of the subjects and third, depriving the individuals to access an appropriate and available medical care.These three statements are a clear example of abuse and negligence against a vulnerable society. Rebecca Skloot, in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Skloot reveals “The public learn about the Tuskegee study until the seventies, after hundreds of men enrolled in it had already died. The news spread like pox…rumors started circulating that the doctors had actually injected the men with syphilis in order to study them” (50). Nowadays, African Americans are very difficult to enroll in medical research. They are still mindset about experiments. In Social Science and Medicine, a group of researchers point out there was lack of detailed information on the study as a significant factor in the misinformation and rumors about government conspiracies and genocide. One participant linked the lack of information on the study with the creation of myths and rumors (805).

The Tuskegee Experiment has been converted into a metaphor, symbolizing racism in medicine, misconduct in human research, the arrogance of physicians, and government abuse of black people. Many articles have been wrote the predisposition of African Americans to distrust medical and public health authorities lowing to a critical level their participation in clinical trials and organ donations. Furthermore, an emphasis of syphilis study in a social context remarks that several factors have influenced, and continues today influencing African Americans’ attitudes toward the biomedical community. They fears about exploitation by the medical professionals remembering the period when they were slaves and obtained their freedom as subjects for dissection and medical experimentations. Although physicians also used poor whites as subjects, they used black people far more often.  

The racial logic tells us that Tuskegee study can be catalogue as an abuse in many ways even though some details are lost or misremembered. The facts that it was a government study that only targeted African American men, which led patients to believe they were being treated when the physicians denied them treatment, and resulted in a long-lasting manipulation of trust are keys to Tuskegee’s cultural power in memory and fears. Therefore, there is a racial logic that syphilis was behaved different in blacks and whites. These evidencesstate why Tuskegee abuse could possibly happen, in part because racism left a population underfed, undereducated, ill, and in a critical need of treatment.

The racism that led to the denial of care, deceit, and questionable ethics at Tuskegee is remembered to shore up this demand and dismiss racism charges when a drug is approved for only Afro-Americans, while the logic of race that made Tuskegee abuse happened is forgotten or ignored. “Biological plausibility,” focused on genetic expressions yet to be determined, allows race to become the real surrogate endpoint inthis clinical study, and this meta-language, once again, overwhelms other variable, except when race is supposed to disappear to make a larger group of potential uses of the drugappear.

Even though the Tuskegee syphilis study is surrounded by rumors and blow whistles pointing different situations like if they injected them with the disease or they were already infected, is not a secret that the treatment for the participants in such experiment was not completely orthodox. We must consider Tuskegee as a story of injury and mistreatment specially when the subjects of study are poor, vulnerable, and are the potential target of exploitation. Tuskegee stimulates reflection and questions on social justice even though some has tried to distort the truth, misusing the memory of the four hundred men whose most basic rights were violated for forty years.   The Tuskegee study stimulates public attention when it comes to distribute responsibilities and moral obligations. Those researchers where focus on science success and personal ennobles throughout posterity but never established sensibility toward those who are socially vulnerable. Tuskegee study demonstrated even using the justification that everything was done in the name of science,researchers must meet certain criteria and respect all individuals’ rights to know step by step what they are being submitted todeterminate the whether it is adequate or not and avoid results as the Tuskegee syphilis study. By focusing primarily on the medical facts of treatment for syphilis, we can argue if the subjects would be white maybe the case would have been different.

Works Cited

Gray, Fred D.”The Study Revealed.” Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond: (2002). 74. EbscoHost. Web.6 Feb 2012.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway ​​​​​   Paperbacks. 2010.Print.

Smith, Susan L. “Neither Victim nor Villain: Nurse Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work.” Journal of Women’s History 8.1 (1996):95-108. EbscoHost. Web. 20 Feb 2012.

V.S. Freimuth et al”African Americans’ Views on Research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” Social Science and Medicine (2001): 805. EbscoHost. Web. 04 Feb 2012.

Blog 21; An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore's effort to alert us about global warming, in a forme of a documentary film.  Through enjoyable humor, he describes the consequences and potential future of our planet if we don’t pay attention to rising global temperatures due to human activities. The point of this film  is to educate us about the poisoning of our atmosphere and ozone layer by the rising  amount of pollution and carbon dioxide which we all have produced.

Besides the fact that our atmosphere and environment are being altered, Gore talks about how weather is affected, hurricanes are getting larger and more violent, giving Katrina as an example which grew up after passing through the warm water of The gulf of Mexico and hit New Orleans in a devastating way. Apparently, everything in our world is interconnected, while some countries are suffering from harsh droughts and heat others are flooding. The great mount Kilimanjaro‘s snow cap has diminished as well as glaciers are starting to melt, Greenland in the way to collapse, involving a rise in sea level that could possibly impact the low level coastal communities. Al Gore blamed consumerism in the industrialized nations for potentially injure our atmosphere and not sacrifice in order to alive this crisis.

Another major problem that causes Global Warming is population. More people signify more food, and more transportation systems. That means more methane and more burning of fossil fuels, and more agriculture becoming in more pollution. Throughout the 150 years of the industrialized age, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased out of the chart. Over the same period, the level of atmospheric methane has risen by 151 percent, mostly from agricultural activities such as raising farm animals and growing food. We are constantly taking advantage of our natural resources and giving nothing back in return.

He also encourages the viewers to explore for references and information on how every individual can help to curb the CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, one of the main challenges is reducing the burning of coal. This is perhaps the most difficult cause nobody wants to confront the richer nations that lead and base their economy on fossils and its derivate. Everyone wants to keep living the same comfort, which are thanks to the energy stored in such fuels.

What we can possibly do as individual in the meanwhile is creating alternatives to reduce our own gas emissions, little thing that could make a difference such as driving less, recycling every time we have the chance, consuming organic food, eating less meat, buying fuel efficient appliances and vehicles. Vote for political parties committed to real change, who compromise with changing our environment and solutions to pollution. 

Blog 20; The Story of Stuff and Labor

Planned obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product that won’t last a large period of life. After certain period it won’t work or become obsolete. It benefits the producer because it keeps the consumer buying the same product or its replacements. The responsible of this business strategy is our economic model. Producers decided shortening the efficiency and products life to cheap the prices and improve their sale. Nowadays, designers purposefully limit the quality of products while companies employ our best minds to create a product that fills the criteria that they demand and not what the consumer demands.

The potential beneficiaries from Planned obsolescence are the producers, because it keeps the consumer buying and demanding the product or its replacements. Even though, in some cases the product still works but the consumer is socially pressured to buy a new one that just came out to the market. Fashion pressure stimulates demand. 

Our planet is the one who suffers the consequences of planned obsolescence. The resulting waste is of course deadly for the environment. Our planet is not unlimited; we should start pressing the producers to recycle their own waste. We cannot afford this policy just to encourage growth, as it results in over proportional damage to both the planet and the consumer.

In my personal experience Planned Obsolescence is a new word, but the fact was around my head since a long time ago. It is notable how manufactures are able to put a ship in a printer to record the quantity of copies that have to be made and then stop and send an error message. My cellular is only a year and is not working properly already as well I have been pressured by my friends to change it.

To be continued.....

Blog 19; CAT-W/Sleep Dealer Injects Sci-Fi into Immigration Debate

Sleep Dealer is an extraordinary film that tells the story, in the near future, of a young Mexican guy named Memo, who grew up attached to a homemade radio that was intercepted by U.S. military commanders. His father like others Mexican villagers were forced to buy water from mechanical robot on their own river that now belongs to The United States. Memo Flied to Tijuana looking for job in cyberfactories. He got nodes all over his body to become a remote worker, someone who works for The United States but doesn't receive the benefits he is supposed to.

The movie is the perspective of Alex Rivera, who wanted to recreate a film about the future in a third world country, involving the discussed immigration story. At a certain point, the world resembles more connected than ever but, unfortunately, that’s not the truth. We can see in the movie a border dividing the dream of hard-working people who deserve a better situation.

Sleep Dealer is an attempt to use science fiction to describe how would be future of third world people. Future where not just human-machines are connected but human-human interface.  Due to technology, Americans already have closed the border and still have the capacity of constructing buildings, picking up their fruits, taking care of their children without any of the immigrants in their territory. However, the culture doesn't change; we still see the differences, poverty, abuse and exploitation.


This is the story that never ends, the dominants taking advantage of the minority. Industrial Technology is constantly changing the aspects of society making the relationship in between countries hostile and uneven. It seems like if we are permanently creating new forms of exploitation and oppression behind the excuse of new opportunities to rise in the social structure and succeed in America.

Blog 18: Sleep Dealer; privacy in the Internet age.

                                                                                                                                                         

The transmission of data via the Internet requires the control or mandate of privacy of who might access the information. A large number of experts within the field of Internet security and privacy believe that such privacy doesn't exist. Actually, we might think that our private information is being broadcast on purpose. As a matter of fact, the risk of displaying your information through the Internet is increasing due to the quantity of gadgets and social pages that require our private information in order to allow us to become members or join them.

Everyone must pay attention to Internet privacy for several reasons. We conduct part of our live online, we go shopping, banking and socializing online. All this involves introducing our personal information onto the Internet. Theft online is growing at an alarming rate, because we transmit so much personal information. The simple fact that the internet’s success has been built on a protocol called HTTP (Hyper Text Convey Protocol) which is very simple, quick and efficient it unfortunately transmits everything into clear text. This particular issue makes  anyone who intercepts this data can easily monitor our movements. The big question is:  How do we keep our privacy intact while we surf? There are critical points that we must pay attention to: 

Cookies: 

Small text files that are stored on our computers to record accounts and improve browsing. If we are concerned about Internet privacy we just need to erase these records, temporary Internet files and images stored on our personal computers. 

Hiding Internal Protocol address (IP) :

Every time we visit a web site it will record our IP address in specifics logs. Everything we ԁο, download and look at in the Internet is recorded in a log that саn be tracked down to a specific computer via the IP address. To solve this we need an anonymous deputy server. Setting the deputy server between our PCs and the web sites we visit will hide our IP addresses so it cannot be recorded.

Encrypting Web Browsing: 

This is the mοѕt vital for real privacy during surfing. All browsing is conducted in clear text, in fact the most detailed and complete list of all our online activities exists in our ISP. Because of this, governments in all Europe ensure having access to logs anԁ ISPs. They are legally bound to store them for up to two years. But if we encrypt our connection these anԁ all other logs browsed are unreadable. 


E-mails:

Do not open any emails you receive from unknown persons. Sometimes you may receive links to click; there is a chance of losing your privacy if you click on the link. Try to get the details of the website you receive or do a research in Google about the site.

Log-out:
Remember to log out of you online accounts after you have completed your work; this will help you to keep your privacy online.

So far, through the Internet it is fairly easier to find someones home address and telephone number, the closest relatives, and where we work with a bit of Internet detecting. Therefore, we neglect our privacy when we disclose information on social sites such as face book or tweeter. We use to inform people when we go on vacation, go to zip a coffee and how long we are going to stay, making it easier for someone who wants to robe us or assault us. Sometimes we divulge our personal information just for pleasure, ignoring the risks we are attracting.

Blog 17: Reflection

Food marketers make us eat whatever they want us to eat. We are targeted to consume what they suggest us. As in the matrix, The Truman Show and The allegory of the cave we are relegated to do what somebody else wants us to do, we are controlled and not able to see the reality, we just want to eat.

If we compare The Matrix and the food Market, it takes us to the point of the blue and the red pills, we have the choice to select healthy or junk food. The blue pill reflects the easy way like junk food, is easier to stand in front of a counter and ask for a meal with French fries and soda is a pretty quick service than going home select vegetables and whole healthy food and start cooking paying attention to fats, calories and carbohydrates which represents the red pill.

A recent study by Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny suggested that junk food consumption alters brain activity in a manner similar to addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin. After many weeks on a junk food diet, the pleasure centers of rat brains became desensitized, requiring more food for pleasure. After the junk food was taken away and replaced with a healthier diet rats starved for two weeks instead of eating nutritious fare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_food

Blog 16: Let them eat fat

Fast food companies are increasing their targeting in the poorest areas of the country. In effect, the main consumers of that low nutritional food are low-income residents who don’t pay attention to fats as long as they eat and get satisfied. Low-income consumers should follow more dietary recommendations to eat healthier such as grains, less fat and sugar. The community must be impacted by advertisements and suggestion on the availability and cost of healthier food.

Fast food corporation’s developers found a target in those low-income consumers and their need of finding cheap food on their way home or after school. In addition, fast food restaurants got innovated meals enlarging it with the famous supersize, which means getting the double of soda and fries potatoes. Customers think they are making a good deal “supersizing” the meal for just 79 cents, but they don’t realize at the moment the price they will pay by putting their own health in jeopardy.

A diet high in sodium, calories, carbohydrate and fat saturated results in health problems such as high blood pressure, anticipated diabetes and circulation disorders. In consequence, being the consumers the low-income population the cost goes on the public Health Department. Customer and common people don’t take in count that a diet high in glucose and fat saturated will harm their health faster and easier than cooking at home. Having an appropriated and balanced diet people would live longer and wouldn’t crowd hospitals.



The main solutions to this problem are regulation and education. Those corporations pay high salaries to developers to market and position their products, the same way; they should find developers and Scientifics to improve the quality of their food, to make it harmless to the customers. In addition, education is a critic point in this situation. Uneducated people don’t eat healthy because of their ignorance; as a result, they get sick easier becoming an elevated cost to Health Department.