Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Hello internet, and welcome to The Science They Don't Want You to Know.  As I have mentioned in the first post of this series, I am doing research regarding the statistical viability of currently unconfirmed conspiracies (no leaked documents) by way of currently known conspiracies (documents have been leaked).  The primary purpose of this initial research is to gather particular information, specifically how many people were involved in the actual conspiracies and the length of time which these conspiracies took place.  If you have not read the first post, you should read it here.

The Nazi's have done some pretty horrible biological and medical experiments during the second world war.  From infecting them with diseases to cold and calculating torture to attaching an octopus arm to a recently sawed off body part of a Jewish person, these experiments were cruel and obscene, to put it mildly.  Leave it to the Nazi's to come up with some truly terrifying experiments.  There's just one problem with that thought, though: America is not exactly innocent when it comes to its variety of immoral medical experiments, and there is American documentation to prove it.

As an aside, this is part of a statistics-gathering series, which the point is to gather statistical data on revealed conspiracies in order to perform statistical analysis on supposed conspiracies.  In order to get the most out of this entry, you should start here.  You don't have to, but the last paragraph or two will make more sense if you do.

Syphilis was rampaging the land, and doctors were desperate to try to understand it in order to develop a cure.  So, in the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the US was desperate to try to find a cure for Syphilis which had a higher than a 30% success rate and whose survivors did not have a myriad of side affects, as opposed to the mercury and bismuth based treatments which took years to take to completion, and had too little of a success rate to be viable.  So, in the weeks following the stock market crash, the US Public Health Service (USPHS) began mapping out a plan for finding out how to cure syphilis.

In 1932, the experiment began.  It was supposed to be a 60 day trial of specifically untreated black men in Tuskegee, Alabama.  These specific men were also drastically undereducated and underprivileged, and one can speculate that this is why this town was used instead of, say, black men in Chicago where they are relatively better off educationally and fiscally.  The organization not only told the subjects that they would eventually treat white men as well as women, that never happened.  Not only was there this severe racism taking place with the (which is horrible in and of itself), there was also the fact that the consent these men gave was not informed.

They only consented to being studied for "bad blood", which is a term used for ailments ranging in severity from fatigue and the common cold to anemia and syphilis.  With that kind of term, there is no way for the consent to be informed.  Another step for the consent not being informed is that the subjects were told that they would be treated, even though they weren't.  Even when penicillin was introduced into circulation 15 years later in the 1940's, they went untreated by the Public Health Service, the group whose main service is public health.  This study, which was supposed to last 6 months, give or take a few days, kept on going until it was revealed to the American Public by the Washington Star and followed up by the New York Times in 1972, a full 40 years after it began.  As you'll notice, 40 years is significantly longer than 6 months.

So keeping up with the intent from the first post of this series, this gives us a time of 40 years for the calculations.  What about the number of people?  After all, not nearly everyone in the USPHS was in on this conspiracy.  Based on their own website, "More than 6,500 Commissioned Corps officers" work for the USPHS.  Since there are 11 categories of employees in the USPHS, and only four of those categories -- physicians, nurses, Health Services, and Science and Research Health Professions -- would fall under the class of employees which would be involved in the conspiracy, we can estimate that the maximum number of employees involved in this conspiracy is about 4/11ths of the total employee count, or about 2,400 people.  Since there is no way to reduce this number any further, this is the value I will use for statistical analysis.

If your keeping track at home, this is the third entry of the series.  This gives us the ability to start legitimately begin calculating the standard deviation, which is a measure of how the values deviate from the "standard value", or the average.  The "standard deviation" is the "average deviation from the average value".  So let's do some statistics.  Using the modal described in the first blog of this series, we have a per person per year probability of failure of the conspiracy being 0.0006992%.  Remember, that's per person per year of the existence of the Syphilis "experiment".  That's the largest value yet, so that brings the average up to 0.0003433%.  The standard deviation -- how much each value varies with respect to the average -- is 0.0003103%.

So until next time, take that as you will.
K. "Alan" Eister Δαβ

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