Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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1978 - 197912010 - 20112

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Subject: search.filters.subject.U.S. Public Health Service

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Presidential panel excoriates former Pitt dean
    (2011) Ove, Torsten
    A presidential ethics panel today excoriated the late Dr. John Cutler, a revered dean at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1960s, and his colleagues at the U.S. Public Health Service for deliberately infecting hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and prostitutes with syphilis from 1946 to 1948, including 83 who died. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues concluded that Dr. Cutler's experiments were morally indefensible, even for the standards of the time, and that he and his fellow doctors tried to keep secret what they were doing because they knew it was wrong.
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    Panel to report on controversial medical research project
    (2011) Ove, Torsten
    A presidential panel investigating a controversial 1940s medical research project in Guatemala led by a doctor who later became a prominent professor and dean at the University of Pittsburgh will discuss its findings on Monday at a public meeting in Washington, D.C. Since last fall, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has been investigating U.S. Public Health Service experiments conducted by Dr. John Cutler in which he deliberately infected almost 700 Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients and soldiers with syphilis without their knowledge. After issuing an apology for the research, President Barack Obama directed his bioethics panel to…
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    Racism and Research: The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
    (1978) Brandt, Allan M.
    In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) initiated an experiment in Macon County, Alabama, to determine the natural course of untreated, latent syphilis in black males. The test comprised 400 syphilitic men, as well as 200 uninfected men who served as controls. The first published report of the study appeared in 1936 with subsequent papers issued every four to six years, through the 1960s. When penicillin became widely available by the early 1950s as the preferred treatment for syphilis, the men did not receive therapy. In fact on several occasions, the USPHS actually sought to prevent treatment. Moreover, a committee at the federally operated Center for Disease Control decided in 1969 that the study should be continued. Only in 1972, when accounts of the study first appeared in the national press, did the Department of Health, Education and Welfare halt the experiment.