The Tuskegee Study and the apology by former President Clinton

The Tuskegee Syphilis study was a study on a select amount of Black males in Macon county, Alabama. The study was to monitor the progression of syphilis throughout African American males. The study lasted more than forty years and even after a cure was found the infected were lied to and denied treatment. In his speech President Clinton apologizes on behalf of himslef, the government, and the American people for the absolute disregard of human rights. He says that this study has significantly reduced the confidence and trust in government funded healthcare programs and that needs to be fixed. He also says that there will be considerable regulation of human rights in medical studies so that this will never happen again. I believe this was a genuine apology on his and our governments part for the study and its ramifications. I think that President Obama being elected will play a huge role in helping to restore the confidence that African Americans have in our government and its associated programs.

public health and bio terrorism

There are many good things that came with the eradication of small pox but few could predict how this public health victory has opened up a huge threat to modern society in the form of bio terrorism. Public health and bio terrorism are closesly tied because a act of bio terrorism would be unleashed on a very large group of civilians and with no knowledge about what to do. Public health would be very important in a bio terrorism situation especially if small pox would be used as the weapon. Public health officials would play a very important role in containment and treatment of such an attack. Another public health victory that could be used for bio terrorism is in the public water systems. Since most developed countries have a system in place that disperses large amounts of clean drinking water to the public it is very possible that a terrorist group could poison this water supply with either a natural deadly bacteria or some kind of poison. Whatever was used could be spread extremely quickly and could go un noticed for a large period of time depending on what contaminant was used. This could pose a serious risk to public health and would be extremely hard to counteract.