The Julius Rosenwald Fund syphilis seroprevalence studies

In 1929 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in conjunction with the Public Health Service (PHS), sponsored a syphilis seroprevalence study in the South characterized as a humanitarian effort to benefit the health of rural African Americans. The study reported extraordinarily high rates of positive Wassermann tests, even among children. Despite the unreliability and nonspecificity of this test, modern authors continue to indict these subjects as syphilitic. However, there was no consistent relationship between syphilis and a positive Wassermann test. Additional treponemal pathogens that potentially caused false-positive tests could explain the results. After public outcry to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Rosenwald study acquired new significance. It was used as evidence to bolster the argument that Tuskegee was a consequence of humanitarian motives that became captive to misguided methods of researchers at the Venereal Disease Division of the PHS. Humanitarianism implies the acknowledgement of a right invested in the recipient; health is an end in itself. However, African Americans were necessary as a source of cheap labor for competition in the world cotton markets and as a restraint on the market value of white labor in manufacturing. The administrative structure of the PHS, not zealous individuals, adopted utilitarianism as its paradigm for human research. Syphilis seroprevalence was a calculated use of public health as a means to economic development.