Ethics and Infectious Diseases – Artifact 3
When doing research on infectious diseases, one must be very careful because people’s lives are on the line. Much progress has occurred within the last few decades in regards to ethics in science, but looking back on our research history with diseases, there are a few disappointing things to highlight. In the past, the focus was on the greater good. What I mean by this is researchers used to be okay with disenfranchising certain ethnic groups in order to learn more about diseases to keep the majority ethnic group healthier.
Informed consent is a relatively new development in the world of experiments. According to informed consent, subjects in the experiment must be told exactly what is going to happen to them, that way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they’d really like to be in the experiment. The Tuskegee Study was rationalized through racism. Government scientists noticed the uniquely black and poor demographics of Tuskegee, and knew that they could exploit that population for their research without them making a fuss about it.
The Tuskegee Study was unethical for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, researchers went into this study with negative intentions. They knew that they could take advantage of men in this population, and they jumped on the opportunity to perform a dangerous study on them. It’s one thing to execute a dangerous study, but the people you’re observing at least need to know the risks that they’re being exposed to. The men in the study were told that they were going to be treated for this deadly disease, but in reality were just given placebo treatment. The government doctors were essentially just documenting the phases of death with syphilis while these men thought they were being treated.
Studies like the Tuskegee Study cause people to lose a lot of trust in the public health system. As citizens, you should be able to trust doctors to have your best interest in mind. After these unethical studies were done, many people lost a lot of trust in the scientific community, especially among people in minority communities.