Tuskegee Syphilis Study: When Research Goes Too Far
When it comes to ethical issues, there are some that surround infectious disease and the treatment/research involved with them. Sometimes the best way to keep an infectious disease from spreading is to keep the infected person in quarantine, or isolated from the rest of society. This is a difficult area, ethically, because sometimes the infected person does not consent to being isolated. Ethical issues also come into play with vaccinations. For example, with the smallpox vaccine, certain countries began to make the vaccine lawfully mandatory. Some people felt this was unethical and against their rights. Therefore, this method of required vaccines drifted away with smallpox at the time.
As for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, there were many ethical issues involved. For one, only one race and gender of people were used in the study, African men. This clearly shows discrimination of subjects. However, even worse was the fact that these men were all poor and could not afford health care, so a study like this appeared to be a good opportunity for them to get health care even if it were experimental. Once the study began, the researchers lied to the participants telling them that the spinal tap was a treatment they were lucky to be getting. This made the painful spinal tap, seem like a privilege to the poor men involved. The arguably most unethical part of the study, however, was the fact that treatment for syphilis had been found but the study’s participants were withheld from using it, so they could further be studied. The study was rationalized originally for learning more about syphilis and a cure. Then it was said to be studied because the researchers believed that African Americans responded to syphilis differently. Lastly, the researchers attempted to justify their study as being ethical because they were researching the effects of syphilis over time on untreated participants.
The potential consequences for unethical studies such as the one mentioned above, is a lack of trust in future research studies. For example, since the Tuskegee Syphilis Study contained only African Americans, there’s a high possibility African Americans will no longer consent to participate in future studies on anything. This is because they may have lost trust in this kind of research just because of one horribly unethical study. Even further, they might not even trust medical professionals at health centers and hospitals due to the research done on the African American men in Tuskegee.
References/Help Received
- Tuskegee Syphilis Film
- Canvas Page Syphilis