The Tuskegee legacy
Thursday, January 29, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

THE QUIET death of Ernest Hendon earlier this month is an uncomfortable reminder of a disgraceful era of American medicine.

Hendon, 96, was the last survivor of the 623 black men who were duped by the federal government to be part of a cruel Tuskegee Syphilis Study on the effects of the disease when left untreated.

Initially designed as a 6-month study, it began in 1932 by inducing poor rural Alabama men with promises of free health care, lunches and transportation to hospitals. But the government-reviewed experiment lasted 40 years, ending in 1972 only after an Associated Press reporter exposed it.

By then, more than 100 of the men had died from untreated syphilis or related complications, scores of their wives had been infected and at least 19 of their children had contracted the disease that causes blindness, mental illness, physical deformities and more if left unchecked.

"It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy,'' said President Bill Clinton, offering a national apology to relatives of the men in 1997. Clinton noted that the study sowed "distrust of our medical institutions'' -- particularly among blacks -- and he vowed to restore that lost confidence.

But while fallout from Tuskegee has spurred federal regulations that now mandate informed patient consent and restrict the treatment of human subjects in research, suspicion lingers, especially because discernible racial disparities in health care remain. "To this day, even when blacks have the same medical insurance and symptoms, they are treated differently and more likely to die than whites,'' said Dr. Stephen Thomas, professor of community health and social justice at the University of Pittsburgh.

The legacy of Tuskegee, and the deep distrust it engendered, has not gone away.