SciDev.Net

Nanotechnology: The social and ethical issues

This report, published by the Project on Emerging Technologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, looks at social and ethical issues of emerging technologies, with a focus on nanotechnologies. The author examines social context issues such as unequal access to health care,...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: January 2009 | EN

National code of health research ethics in Nigeria

This draft document contains general guidelines on the creation and governance of health research ethics committees (HRECs) in Nigeria. It also lists the principal characteristics research projects need to demonstrate in order to gain HREC approval. Research in Nigeria must have social or...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: 2006 | EN

Ethical and regulatory issues surrounding African traditional medicine in the context of HIV/AIDS

This paper by Aceme Nyika provides a comprehensive review of the ethical issues in research using indigenous medicines, focusing in particular on the use of traditional medicine to treat HIV/AIDS in Africa. The author suggests that the superstition attached to African traditional medicine, together...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: 2006 | EN

The International Compilation of Human Subject Research Protections

This compilation is designed to provide institutional review boards and researchers with an overview of countries' ethics regulations and guidelines. It focuses on countries that are major recipients of US government research funding. As well as providing links to key organisations it offers...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: June 2005 | EN

Moving to research partnerships in developing countries

In this article Costello and Zumla suggest that much foreign-led research in developing countries remains semi-colonial in nature and may have negative effects on the countries in which it is conducted. In light of these concerns they ask what principles should lie behind investment in research in...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 2000 | EN

The ethics of placebo-controlled trials – a middle ground

In this thoughtful article, Emanuel and Miller outline the stances taken by those on both sides of the debate about using placebos in research. The first is that placebos should be used as a control unless this would increase the risk of death or irreversible morbidity as a result. The other view...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 2001 | EN

Withholding proven treatment in clinical research

In this editorial Huston and Peterson suggest that the concern about withholding treatment in research has been inappropriately focused on placebos. They note the difference between the Declaration of HelinksiSs criterion of Rno proven treatmentS and the regulatory criterion of Rno irreversible...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 2001 | EN

Women's health and human rights in HIV prevention research

In this article Fitzgerald and M-T Behets outline four incidents that arose while conducting HIV clinical research with women in African and Caribbean countries to illustrate the "massive ethical challenges for researchers in HIV prevention trials". The cases include an HIV-positive husband...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: January 2003 | EN

Public-private partnerships for health: their main targets, their diversity, and their future direct

Roy Widdus discusses reasons for inadequate access to treatment for infectious diseases in developing countries, and reviews methods to address these. Noting that drugs and vaccines may not be available for a number of reasons -- including the lack of incentives for their development or inadequate...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: August 2001 | EN

HIV-1 vaccine trials and tribulations

This collection of short papers from the 'health and human rights' section of The Lancet focuses on the provision of long-term care for participants who become infected with HIV-1 during HIV-1 vaccine trials in resource-poor countries. S...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 2003 | EN

Medical researchers' ancillary clinical care responsibilities

One frequently-raised issue relating to standards of care in research is the responsibilities researchers have if they identify medical conditions unrelated to the study during the course of research in developing countries. In this article, Leah Belsky and Henry Richardson propose an ethical...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: June 2004 | EN

Beyond informed consent

In this review article, Zulfiqar Bhutta focuses on recent developments in informed consent and highlights issues relevant to developing countries. This paper provides a very brief history of consent to medical research, before summarising the provisions on consent provisions in recent reports and...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: October 2004 | EN

Unethical trials of interventions to reduce perinatal transmission of HIV in developing countries

This 'sounding board' article in the New England Journal of Medicine is the most substantive of the three articles that stimulated international debate about the ethics of placebo-controlled trials in developing countries (the other two were editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine (see...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 1997 | EN

The ethics of clinical research in the third world

This editorial is one of three articles that started the current debate about appropriate standards of care in clinical trials (the other two were an article by Peter Lurie and Sydney Wolfe in the same edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (see below), and an editorial in The Lancet)....

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: September 1997 | EN

What are the effects of the fifth revision of the Declaration of Helsinki?

This "education and debate section" focuses on the 2000 revision of the Declaration of Helsinki, and comprises four articles commissioned from researchers working in the developing world, the developed world, the pharmaceutical industry, and a patient representative. South African researcher...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: December 2001 | EN

Fifty years later: the significance of the Nuremberg Code

Evelyne Shuster opens this article with the Nuremberg Code - the precursor to the Declaration of Helsinki and other international and national guidance on the ethics of medical research. Shuster discusses the role of physicians in the formulation of the Code during the famous Nuremberg trials...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: November 1997 | EN

The revised Helsinki Declaration: is it enough?

In this article Asad Jamil Raja discusses some of the revised provisions in the 2000 revision of the Declaration of Helsinki and considers their implications for developing countries. Two points singled out for particular consideration are paragraph 19 (which requires a "reasonable likelihood" that...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: October 2001 | EN

Development of guidelines for non-Indigenous people undertaking research among the Indigenous population for north-east Victoria, Australia

This article discusses the development of guidelines to ensure that researchers work in culturally appropriate and non-exploitative ways with indigenous Australian populations. Reflecting the concerns of some research populations in developing countries, the authors note that indigenous communties...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: May 2002 | EN

A review of a South African research ethics committee

In this article Mahomed A Dada and Ruweida Moorad discuss the first review undertaken of the research ethics committee at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. The review aimed to provide insight into the structure, composition, procedures and workload of the...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: April 2002 | EN

Ethics of Vaccine Research

US-based ethicist Christine Grady argues that clinical trials of vaccines, including against HIV, require special considerations when it comes to deciding upon an ethical framework. Most clinical trials, she says, are for therapeutic drugs, with narrowly focused outcomes aimed at benefiting the...

KEY DOCUMENT | Publication date: May 2004 | EN