Guatemala and Tuskegee Syphillis Studies

In a period between 1932 and 1972, both Guatemalan men and African American Men in Tuskegee, Alabama were infected with venereal diseases, the most notable among them syphillis without their consent.

The men in Tuskegee were infected first, injected and tested frequently. Some were even told that spinal taps that were a part of the study were special free medical procedures. And when penicillin became available as a cure, none of the men were treated with it and their life expectancy dropped by almost half.

The Guatemalan men ranged from soldiers to prisoners and were sent infected prostitutes as "gifts", and infected through scrapes doctors made on various parts of their body.

Though the second group of men were infected for the purpose of testing penicillin as a cure, both of these experiments were conducted without ethics of any sort, violation all but two of the Nuremberg Codes established after WWII specifically for this kind of testing. There was no type of informed consent and especially in the Tuskegee trail, the doctors tried very little to reduce the risk of long term issues as a result of their experiments.

If they had informed the men of what was going on and administered medicine to the men in Tuskegee, or at least offered some sort of compensation to those families, they wouldn't have violated so many ethical guidelines. The downside there, though, is that almost no one would willingly be infected with syphilis.

Since we're talking about it...#1

This week, the theme has been how our health relates to our wealth. Some of the things that plague the lower levels of society, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and, our topic of discussion for now: obesity. We've learned that it's one of the things that we are faced with to our detriment the less we make a year, and now, ironically, we learn that it's also the biggest financial detriment as we age.

This article lays out the vicious circle. Obesity leads to heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and strokes. Those illnesses lead to loss of employment and a huge shot to your income when one is relegated to living off of disability checks. Loss of job and income leads to a drop in social status, which, as we've learned over the course of the week, leads to the drop in quality of life, namely: time for healthy activity and access to healthy food. Less access to healthy food and activity leads to, you guessed it: obesity. And then we start all over.

So over the course of the week, we've gotten quite a few reasons for the rise and fall of health as we cross "classes". Stress, access to health insurance, and access to healthy activity and food. For a class-less society, we sure have what looks like a social-class disparity.

In-Class Discussion #1

In the first few days of class, we watched a video relating, once again, wealth to overall health and life expectancy. It broke the correlations down almost exactly, around more or less 2 years per $20,000 difference. Though the correlation is expected, the preciseness is not. The video did, however, offer a reason for the correlation, the reason being stress hormones and their long term effects on the body.

What I question there is how it this correlation works with people who move classes in our "Classless" society. How do children born in section 8 housing who graduate Ivy League and become six-figure income adults fare? Or what about children born into upper middle class who are knocked down below the poverty line after the economy crashes in their adults years? Do they average out or adopt the life expectancy of their class as they move?

Health Status and Health Care Access of Farm and Rural Populations

This article explored the differences of "metro and non-metro" (city and rural) and "farmer and non-farmer" households in terms of their health status and access to adequate healthcare.  The findings were pretty typical, the rural areas having less access to health care (though it does seem that the health care they do have access to is about on par with metro area healthcare in terms of service.) and the non-farmer households within nonmetro areas are more at risk for things like obesity and adopt more risky behaviors such as smoking.

We generally see the same patterns in nonmetro areas as we see in metro areas, including the one I'm from (Durham, NC). While farmer households have more work-related injuries, they're more likely to be higher educated and as a result, have higher qualities of life as opposed to the nonfarmer households. We see the same trends in the metro areas, where professionals and highly educated individuals live higher qualities of life due to their better access to medical care.

What does worry me slightly about the research is the way they obtained their data. While they'd be hard-pressed to find any other way but survey to obtain this information, it becomes automatically objective. People are often reluctant to admit that they are not as healthy as they would like to be and when you survey people, you are automatically open to their biases and hinderances.

That being said, the study does seem to correlate with everything we see and hear on a regular basis regarding health in relation to social status.