on last friday,11/7/2008, the fifth day of my second year as a phase 2 student, i was too sien...nothing to do, so went to computer lab to online just after the lectures...

being a quite obedient student, of course i had joted down some notes in the lecture.sitting in front of the computer, not knowing which web site to visit...i flipped through the notes and noticed "Tuskegee Syphilis", 2 new terms which i had joted down in the 'Epidemiology & Statistic' class. The professor asked us to seach for it if we were interested, well, it was just a nice-to-know thing, sure wont come out in exam. since so sien, in addition to my curiousity, i google it. And...i found something that i cant accept...(at least at that moment. after nights of thinking of it, i accept the reality now)

The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.
—President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997

glossary

Tuskegee: a name of a place

Syphilis: one type of sex transmited disease

here is the address, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762136.html.

and today, 17/7/2008, i heard about a test which was carried out in University Hospital in the lecture also. the test was about injecting some drugs into the subjects. if the drugs are proven safe to be used, then it will be approved to be sold by local drugs company. the lecturer said he was looking for healthy subjects for a test in the coming August. Every subject wil be given RM300 for their time participating in the test, staying overnight in hospital on friday and can go back on saturday. THE DRUGS ARE SAFE, he mentioned. anyone interested to become the subjects can give him their names.

people always said modern medical treatment is more reliable than traditional medical treatment because the modern medical treatment is proven, have more facts. there are where the FACTs come from, from the TESTs, the EXPERIMENTs, and from the SUBJECTs. there might be risks for the subjects, because nobody know what will happen on the subjects, and those are the things the physicians want to know, so that they can do something better to improve the public health.

the reason for me to accept the reality of Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment:

"when you want to get something, maybe you need to sacrifice something."

and it also reminds me :

"in the medical field, ATTITUDE is important."