For 40 years, the Center for Disease Control, the official agency of the federal government, intentionally did not treat selected syphilitic Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama in order to study the effects of untreated syphilis. Even when penicillin became available in the 1940s, it was deliberately withheld as a treatment for the nation’s most dangerous epidemic.
From 1932 until 1972, doctors from the United States Public Health Service and later the Center for Disease Control conducted medical experiments that equated these events to the atrocities of Nazi scientists against Jewish victims before and during World War II. (TBJ #1719)