While Flint, Michigan battles a water crisis in the north, a different predominantly black town in the south is facing its own devastating public health epidemic, one that seems to come straight out of the Dark Ages: tuberculosis.

The rural, impoverished town of Marion, Alabama, has been hit with a TB outbreak that’s even worse than the disease rates in some developing countries. Marion has reported 253 cases per 100,000 people — which is 100 times greater than the state’s overall TB rate. So far, 20 people, almost all black, have been diagnosed since January 2014, and three have died. ...

But to improve these efforts in Marion, health care workers may have to finally address the region’s medically murky past. Marion’s neighbor to the east, Tuskegee, was home to one of the most notorious medical experiments by the government on black men in the 1930s. Under the guise of offering free health care, federal public heath researchers studied the natural progression of untreated syphilis in 600 black sharecroppers. None of the men were ever informed of their disease, or given penicillin to cure it. However, they were given free burial insurance....

“There is a mistrust of government medicine because of Tuskegee,” Dr. R. Allen Perkins, former president of the Alabama Rural Health Association, told the New York Times. “It dates back to that. We haven’t dealt with the damage of Tuskegee in this state at any meaningful level.”