The Tuskegee Experiment: 40 Years of State-Sanctioned Murder by Neglect
From 1932 to 1972 the U.S. Public Health Service watched 399 Black men die of syphilis they could have cured for pennies.
It was called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Six hundred Alabama sharecroppers - 399 with latent syphilis, 201 controls - were enrolled in 1932. They were told they had "bad blood." They were never told they had syphilis.
They were told they were being treated. They never were.
By 1947 penicillin was the standard cure - cheap, effective, ubiquitous. Federal doctors deliberately withheld it. The men were tracked as they went blind, lost their minds, gave the disease to their wives, fathered children born with it. One hundred twenty-eight died of syphilis or its complications. Forty wives were infected. Nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.
The CDC took over the study in 1957. They knew. They continued.
The study only ended in 1972 because a whistleblower named Peter Buxtun went to the press. Bill Clinton finally apologized in 1997 - 65 years after it began.
If you wonder why a generation distrusts public-health authorities - here is the answer, in plain English, written in blood and federal stationery.