The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was one of the most infamous clinical experiments performed by the U.S. Public Health Services. During this study (1932-1972), African American males who had contracted syphilis were supposedly receiving free health care from the government. The study consisted of 600 sharecroppers at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. 399 of the sharecroppers had syphilis prior to the study and 201 did not have the disease. The participants received free medical care, food, and health insurance. Although the sharecroppers participated in a health study none of them were told that they had syphilis or if it could be treated. Instead they were told they had “bad blood." All six hundred participants were poor and uneducated making it very easy for the government to take advantage of them. In addition to the men in the study, forty men had infected their wives with the syphilis, and nineteen children had been born with the disease as well. When the study first started in 1932, doctors knew that syphilis could be a deadly disease if left untreated. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a bacterium called Treponema pallidum. Syphilis has four stages. During the first stage there are little to no symptoms. About one-third of all infected individuals actually progress into the second stage of syphilis. The second stage of syphilis occurs around two to eight weeks after the initial infection. During this stage, syphilis has reached the bloodstreams therefore causing skin rashes on the palms and soles of the individual’s hands and feet. Some of the other symptoms that occur are swollen lymph nodes, sores in the genital areas, and high fever. During this stage is when it can be transmitted to another the person the most. The next stage of syphilis is called the latent phase which occurs weeks to years after the infection. The final stage occurs three to fifteen years after the initial infection. During the final stage the infected individual suffers the most severe symptoms which are heart disease, brain damage, insanity, and ultimately death. By the 1950’s penicillin was the treatment for the disease, but the researchers chose not to provide the African American syphilis participants with the necessary cure. The study originally started in the Mississippi as a test program among the black community in order to gather some information about the number of syphilis cases and its long term effects. It was so successful, Public Health Services decided to perform studies in 6 different southern states. The project sites were held in Macon County, Alabama: Glynn County, Georgia; Bolivar county, Mississippi,