ABOVE: Bill Jenkins delivers a keynote address during the opening session of the 2010 APHA annual meeting.
COURTESY OF EZ EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY
William Carter Jenkins, a government epidemiologist who tried to call attention to and end the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study, died February 17 of complications related to an inflammatory disease. He was 73.
Run by the US Public Health Service, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study tracked the health of 399 poor black men being treated for “bad blood.” The men didn’t really have bad blood, but instead were infected with syphilis, weren’t told they had the sexually transmitted disease, and weren’t treated for it, though they were told they were being treated for their bad blood. The goal of the study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, was to understand long-term health effects of syphilis. Jenkins learned of the study in the 1960s, when he worked as a statistician at the ...
