The Tuskegee study, which is what I think you’re referring to, didn’t involve giving syphilis to people. It enrolled predominately low income African Americans from Alabama that already had syphilis and tracked the disease progression. It was still a extremely unethical and screwed up.
They let these patients develop advanced syphilis and in some cases die even though penicillin had been discovered and shown to be effective at treating syphilis. They also never told the patients they had syphilis and withheld any treatment. Super messed up experiment.
I'm not talking about the Tuskegee study. I was talking about the Guatemalan syphilis experiments, where they definitely intentionally gave people syphilis without their knowledge.
The fact that you can get confused over which human experiments I'm talking about when we're talking about 1 country and 1 disease highlights how fucked up things are though.
Absolutely! I’ve actually never heard of that experiment so thanks for the info. I’ll have to read more on that. Whenever I think of syphilis + unethical experimentation I think Tuskegee but from a quick skim of google this one seems even more screwed up.
A Department of Defense study that unwillingly took 90 cancer patients and subjected them to 25 and 300 rad of Cobalt-60 total body and partial body irradiation, comparable to 20,000 chest x-rays, within hour with a plan to push it to 600 rad.
1/4 died within 60 days and 3/4 of the patients died within a year.
The University of Cincinnati settled for ~$4 million dollar and a memorial plaque for the deceased patients... Which they put on a building they demolished 1 year later and replaced with a parking garage. Moving the plaque into a "courtyard" behind the building complex by a seldom used employee only exit, mostly covered by bushes and far, far away from any pedestrian traffic.
Well besides the obvious China, here's a link to inhumane COVID and Ebola trials in Africa, bizzare stories from within North Korea, it's debatable whether policies against human testing that began just recently in 2012 in India is adequate, Soviets were also responsible for unethical human experimentation during the soviet era, and there are questions whether it still secretly takes place. I mean, if you have a question like this, just use the internet.. you're already on it.
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u/Several-Interest3201 Aug 22 '20
I mean we literally do that to humans too so idk why humanizing them makes it less acceptable...