Globally, efforts have focused on taking measures to contain the outbreak and prevent further spread. An official global travel advisory and pandemic COVID-19 travel health notice are in effect, we ask citizens to avoid non-essential travel outside Canada until further notice. Risk to Canadians – COVID-19 is a serious health threat, and the situation is evolving daily. The risk varies between and within communities, but given the number of cases in Canada, the risk to Canadians is considered high. We continue to advice and pass useful health concerns/information and or reassess to the communities on the best available evidence as the situation, through our Phone-In practices that we started back in 2020 April. We relay on the “Public Health Agency of Canada that works with provinces, territories and international partners, including the World Health Organization, to actively monitor the situation. Global efforts are focused on containment of the outbreak and the prevention of further spread, our situation is to keep, taking any chances to get the information to our communities through our own African languages, organizing Vaccine clinics, though, fear is huge out there, with the experiences of the injustices the Black Community as gone through, e.g. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) that was an ethically abusive study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African Americans with syphilis.
The purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, though by the end of the study it was entirely treatable, the men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, and more than 100 died as a result. The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled a total of 600 impoverished African American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected. As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care. While the men were provided with both medical and mental care that they otherwise would not have received, they were deceived by the PHS, who never informed them of their syphilis diagnosis and provided disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment for “bad blood”. The men were initially told that the experiment was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years. After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin even though, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis.
The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on Nov 16th of that year, by then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients’ wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards and has been cited as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.”. Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies. At Great Lakes Society, we follow the Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer who is in close contact with provincial and territorial Chief Medical Officers of Health to ensure that any cases of COVID-19 occurring in Canada continue to be rapidly identified and managed to protect the health of Canadians.
Outlined plans and policies in place related to current public health orders and restrictions. Our Strategies include organizing for vaccines clinics, asking Blacks to be tested, the test helps to detect the genetic material of the virus in a sample (usually a swab taken from the back of the nose) from someone who is sick. It has not been an easy journey seeing our loved ones leave us, isolated, on in ICUs. We ask our people to get vaccinated with the focus now on Education, which is huge, using the pictures of the community members known to members, put same pictures in Magazines, TV’ Radios in our own different languages.
