The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, thought to be a major reason, particularly in the US, behind racial and ethnic minority groups' presumed unwillingness to participate in health research, was a US government-funded, epidemiologic study. To assess racial and ethnic minority groups' willingness to participate in current US government-funded, epidemiologic studies, we evaluated the health surveys conducted by the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for the most recent year for which data were available, year 2000.
