From what I've been able to glean from the below reference, at
Sandy Sandfort <ssandfort@attmail.com> writes: S> Nobody wrote: S> S> You know, this radiation experiment reminds me of S> another incident. A group of African-American men were S> injected, without their knowledge or consent, with live S> syphilis spirochaetes, and studied for a number of S> years. No attempt at therapy was ever attempted, as I S> recall, for these individuals. . . . S> S> Actually, this is wrong on two counts. One, the men were not S> injected with syphilis; they had already contracted it when S they went into the program. Correct. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. S> Two, in most cases, they *were* given S> therapy. What was withheld was penicillin. The subjects who S> were treated, were given relatively ineffective and dangerous S> mercury therapies. the very beginning of the study, in 1932, the subjects were given rather innefective treatment. From about 1933 on the focus of the study became purely one of longterm _untreated_ syphilis. Indeed, during United States Public Health Service campaigns against V.D. in the South, during the late '30s and into the '40s when more effective therapies were coming into use, subjects of the study were actively *denied* treatment; to the point of actually pulling them out line at clinics (those who sought treatment), telling them that they weren't supposed to be treated, and sending them home. This "study" was conducted under the auspices of the United States Public Health Service, was not a secret, and ran for 40 years. --Nobody ================================================================== Author: Jones, James H. (James Howard), 1943- Title: Bad blood : the Tuskegee syphilis experiment Impr/Ed: New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York : Maxwell McMillan International, c1993 : LCCN: 92034818