Public Health Service Ethics

The main discussion point of the essay was about how the U.S. Public Health Service is trying to get together a scientific study on African American men and the disease known as syphilis. The USPHS wanted to develop a great experiment where neither the 200 men in the control group or the 400 men in the dependent group discovered that they were a part of the experiment. They also tried to maintain the advertisement of the medication for the disease ongoing, so the experiment could be maintained and the results unaffected. which were used as the control group. In 1972, the results of the test were unsuccessful, due to the fact that at the time 74 of the tested men were still alive and 100 men had eventually died. This consequence resulted from the issue that many men went without the treatment and died in the long run. The USPHS had decided that the study was “ethically unjustified” and the HEW report implied that the misjudgment of not being able to provide penicillin meant that no actual therapy occurred. …show more content…
It is now illegal to make humans a subject of an experiment or to target a certain race. However, the study could be considered both ethical and unethical. It is in a way ethical because they used men that were infected with the bacteria meaning that as they were getting studied on it the men could have a high chance of surviving. Rather than not receiving any treatment and eventually dying off. The fact that they were helping the men survive can be seen as an ethical situation. Although, they did help the men survive the researchers were just doing an ethical thing to gain something for their own interest. Which leads us to how this experiment was unethical. If the researchers would have simply done the experiment by treating both of the races equally and by not deceiving the black men to just receive the cure then the experiment would have been ethical and acceptable