African-Americans still distrust doctors

BALTIMORE, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- One in four African-Americans polled felt their doctors would be willing to ask them to be in a study that might hurt them.

The survey, published in the journal Medicine, found 15 percent of whites believed the same and well over half of the blacks -- compared to less than a quarter of the whites -- thought physicians used medications to experiment on people without their consent.

When the researchers removed those who distrusted physicians from the analysis, the numbers of both races willing to participate in medical research became the same -- roughly one-third of those asked.

"There is enormous irony that without African-American subject participation in clinical trials, we are not going to have tested the best therapies we need to treat African-Americans," senior researcher, Dr. Neil Powe, of John Hopkins University in Baltimore said in a statement.

"So long as the legacy of Tuskegee persists, African-Americans will be left out of important findings about the latest treatments for diseases."

The Tuskegee legacy refers to a 40-year-long study in Alabama that secretly studied the "natural course" of unchecked syphilis in several hundred sharecroppers, who were not given drugs that could have cured them.