The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Term Paper Example The study was based on the hypothesis that black and white people differed in their response to the disease. Before the study was initiated in 1928, the U.S Public Health Services (PHS) had already completed a study in Mississippi in which 25% of the participants who were all black had tested positive for the disease. The PHS intended to expand and continue the study in rural black population and set up a treatment program with aid from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Though the study initially intended to improve the health of the African American population by providing doses of metals which was used to treat the disease during that period, the coming of the great depression drastically lowered the funds for the project. And it was then that the PHS decided to conduct a study based on the aforementioned hypothesis that racial variation plays a role in the effects of syphilis. The objective of the study was to compare the natural progression of syphilis in untreated poor African American s who were followed up for a period of 40 years with a healthy control population who were free of the disease. While the initial study was designed to last for a year and where participants with syphilis were given minimal treatment which would have definitely not cured them, the extended study examined men with untreated syphilis over the 40 year period and in case they died during that period their bodies autopsied to study the exact course of the infection (Angell, 1997; Sugarman, 2002).