As a health professional or health student you need to know a minimum of the health terminology and historical events as well as ongoing debates. For example you have to know the differences between reliability and validity, sensitivity and specificity, bias and confounding factors, also you must be able to explain the John Snow approach to cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and be able to talk about Great Influenza for 10 minutes. If you can explain the different approaches to fight against Malaria and why still in some countries it is necessary to back to DDT and what are the problems of using bed nets, you probably are in the game. Also you should be able to explain in an easy to understand way what is going on in the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine debate during these days.
One of the historical events that every public health student should know about is Tuskegee study. Wikipedia explains the story of Tuskegee in the following words:
“Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male became notorious because it was conducted without due care to its subjects, and led to major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had “bad blood” and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating.
In 1932, when the study started, standard treatments for syphilis were toxic, dangerous, and of questionable effectiveness. Part of the original goal of the study was to determine if patients were better off not being treated with these toxic remedies. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, cited as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history”
Filed under: Blogroll, Disease, Law and Ethics | Tagged: African American, Human Rights, Negro Male, Tuskegee Study
