According to a 1999 study by California State University more than a quarter (27 percent) of the Black Americans it polled believes that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus and spread it among their population. Almost another quarter (23 percent) would not rule out the possibility.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s one-time pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, at a National Press Club speech in April 2008, said he thought the U.S. government was capable of inventing the disease “as a means of genocide against people of colour.”
Well, he said, it wouldn’t be the first time such an abomination had happened. Rev. Wright referenced a U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) study that ran from 1932 and 1972 at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Black Males Told They Had Bad Blood
The study recruited 399 Black males who had syphilis. They were mostly illiterate men from the poorest counties of Alabama. They were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” never that they were suffering from a serious and fatal disease. But, they were not treated at all; they were given “pink medicine” - Aspirin. (In the mid-1940s, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment for syphilis, but the men were denied this therapy.)
The whole point of the study was to monitor what happened to them as they progressed through the later stages of the illness. The notion was to test the theory that African-Americans would succumb differently from white men. There is no record of a similar study being done on white men for comparison purposes.
Diseases Causes Insanity, Blindness, and Death
In the third and final stage of syphilis those infected may have tumors, blindness, paralysis, heart disease, insanity, and death. That’s when the study became most interested in its subjects. Through autopsies the PHS was able to understand more about the ravages of the latter stages of untreated syphilis. James Jones chronicles the whole sad episode in his 1993 book Bad Blood (ISBN: 0029166764).
For his book, Jones interviewed John Heller, Director of the Venereal Diseases unit of the PHS from 1943 to 1948. He quotes Heller as saying: “The men's status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.”
Public Protest Shuts Down Study
In 1972, the nature of the experiment was leaked to the Associated Press. The immediate outcry brought it to a quick end. By then, 28 victims had died of syphilis and another 100 of syphilis-related illness. As well, the wives and children of some people in the study had also been infected.
In May 1997, the few remaining survivors of the study were brought to the White House in Washington. Alison Mitchell of The New York Times quoted President Bill Clinton as telling the survivors the experiment was “clearly racist.” He added: “The United States government did something that was wrong - deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.”
Rupert Taylor - Rupert Taylor is the editor of a magazine that provides background to current events.
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