A whistleblower who revealed the US government had allowed hundreds of Black men to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died at 86. or signup to continue reading Peter Buxtun died in California in May of Alzheimer's, according to his attorney, Minna Fernan. Buxtun is revered as a hero to public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in US history.
Documents that Buxtun leaked, and a subsequent investigation led to a public outcry that ended the study in 1972. Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs be withheld.
The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time. In the mid-1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health employee working in San Francisco when he overheard a co-worker talking about the study. The research wasn't exactly a secret -- about a dozen medical journal articles about it had been published in the previous 20 years.
But hardly anyone had raised any concerns about how the experiment was being conducted. "This study was completely accepted by the American medical community," said Ted Pestorius of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaking at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the en.