Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died. He was 86.
WVAS News Director Melanie Hogan files this report...
Buxtun died May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California, according to his attorney.
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 U.S. history.
Documents Buxtun provided to The Associated Press, and its subsequent investigation and reporting, 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.
