The disease syphilis has been around for centuries and is a terrible virus that can deteriorate skin cell, make people blind, and worst of all crazy. In recent years, the disease has become treatable with common antibiotics such as penicillin. However, with things like infectious diseases, there is always a debate involved with them. In the case of syphilis, it was who was to be treated and who was not. This disease had plagued society since the Columbian exchange, and when it was originally contracted by Europeans, it would kill them within weeks. This was a terrible disease and didn’t discriminate who it attacked or who got it. It could be spread to newborn infants with contact with the bacteria through vaginal births, and could easily be passed on through any sexual contact.

In the nineteen thirties there was a study started call the Tuskegee study of syphilis, and took poor black men who had contracted syphilis to study the effects of syphilis on the human body. The patients were told that they were being treated for “bad blood” when they were really just being experimented on to see the effects. This horrible unethical disease study lasted all the way up to the seventies, which is the most messed up part. This study could have been ended very quickly with penicillin but was continued and played with these men’s lives with very little compensation in the end. The doctors that performed these experiments justified them by saying it would help many people, in the long run, discover that they had contracted syphilis. The question is, how many people could have been saved if these men had just treated their patients like they said they would.

With this study being performed the way it was, it caused a lot of distrust among minorities all over the U.S. when it came to getting any kind of treatment from physicians. This is still true today due to how common knowledge this study is in the United States. One example of this was when a case of TB broke out in Alabama in a small black population, almost no one trusted the doctors in the area to treat it, and the outbreak ended up making it to next to epidemic levels. Trust levels have gotten better in the area since then, but overall is still not great. In my honest opinion, I can’t blame them, especially the minorities.