Gregory Parham

BI-245X

07/15/19

Dr. Hinks

Equality, No Division

            When dealing with numerous topics and subjects, ethics and moral are expected. Ethical problems are constantly popping up every day in many different situations and throughout history. Going from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to smaller ethical issues of vaccines, immigration, and diseases, we should be trying to prevent or reduce these issues. A few more ethical issues dealt with are infectious outbreak of diseases including syphilis, smallpox and other pandemics. At the end of the day, we have to understand everything that went down unethically, learn from it, improve and never go through that again.

First, a couple of ethical issues start with isolation and vaccines. In the past, isolating infected people and taking them away from family members and having nurses take care of them and possibly they are getting infected is hard. When you isolated, it puts the patient in a bad place, they have the worst thoughts, and stay to themselves. Dealing with isolation, an enormous ethical issue is that it separates people from their family. No member of the family wants to see a loved one go away for treatment or just because they are sick. Being around family in a rough time, often brings comfort and positivity. Vaccines has been having their ups and downs throughout history. When outbreaks of different infectious diseases were happening, there were no cure for a specific disease nor people knew what to do. One unethical issue with vaccines were when people didn’t know what to do, they would try many regimes or vaccines and tell people that they were getting helped or cured.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is such an historic case because of the severity of unethical issues that happened during the 40-year span of 1932 to 1972. The study took place in Macon County, Alabama, where a scientist took 400 men, who didn’t have syphilis. Every man was told that they had syphilis and will be treated for that disease as told. A lot of things was told to the participants that would be given to them such as free treatment for “bad blood”, receive penicillin to cure syphilis, and get paid for participating in the experiment. After 40-years of the study, all the men were still not treated and was not fully told the reason for being in the experiment, and not paid until a lawsuit until after the case. The false consent and lack of communication of this study, has scientists and people of higher ups to explain everything thoroughly and carefully, from reasoning for study to side effects and what you’ll be doing.

Ultimately, till this day, we still have trouble realizing that everybody is the same and equal in all aspects of life. We can go down the line of examples for unethical studies performed on a specific group, but we gone refer back to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The study focused on poor, black men from Alabama who would be more likely to participate in the experiment because they didn’t know any better. The scientists based this study straight off race and economic status. The possible consequences of unethical studies performed on a specific group will include spending a lot of money as well as not mentioning the whole study or talking about changes. With spending a lot of money, you have to buy more items and precautions so nothing will be affected on the specific group. It will be unethical in a study to not let the participants know something has changed and the guidelines for the study changed as well. Communication and informed consent are major keys in any study!

References

Module for Artifact 5