Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower who exposed and helped end the Tuskegee syphilis study, a four-decade experiment in which the U.S. Public Health Service used hundreds of Black men as human guinea pigs, died May 18 at a memory-care center in Rocklin, Calif. He was 86. A former venereal disease investigator with the Public Health Service, Buxtun spent seven years trying to draw attention to the Tuskegee study, meeting with journalists, doctors, public health officials and anyone who would listen.
His efforts, and the reporting that he inspired, brought widespread attention to one of the country's most notorious medical scandals, revealing how 399 Black men in the segregated South were exploited for a study in which their syphilis would be monitored but not treated.
From The Guardian:
Buxtun is revered as a hero to public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in US history. Documents that Buxtun provided to the Associated Press, and its subsequent investigation and reporting, led to a public outcry that ended the study in 1972.
Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs be withheld. The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time ... .
In his complaints to federal health officials, he drew comparisons between the Tuskegee study and medical experiments Nazi doctors had conducted on Jews and other prisoners. Federal scientists did not believe they were guilty of the same kind of moral and ethical sins, but after the Tuskegee study was exposed, the government put in place new rules about how it conducts medical research. Today, the study is often blamed for the unwillingness of some African Americans to participate in medical research.
www.theguardian.com
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