Ethical Issues in Global Health Research

Readings

  • Potential benefits, limitations, and harms of clinical guidelines
    "Over the past decade, clinical guidelines have increasingly become a familiar part of clinical practice.  Every day, clinical decisions at the bedside, rules of operation at hospitals and clinics, and health spending by governments and insurers are being influenced by guidelines..."
  • Multi-center trials and subject eligibility: should local IRBs play a role? (download)
    "While its responsibilities to research subjects require the IRB to satisfy itself that the trial as proposed is in all ethical and scientific aspects acceptable, the fact that the multi-center trial has been designed elsewhere and is offered locally as a package deal severely constrains the ability of the local IRB to influence its design and management..."
  • In loco parentis: minimal risk as an ethical threshold for research upon children (download)
    "And within the broad field of social ethics, bioethics in particular must focus upon such responsibilities: to the very old and very young, those muted or rendered incoherent by illness.  Yet delineating the nature of that responsibility has proven to be among the most vexing problems bioethics has faced..."
  • Demarcating research and treatment: a systematic approach for the analysis of the ethics of clinical research
    "How should an IRB understand research protocols that involve the evaluation of standard therapy? Should all risks to which a research subject will be exposed in the course of a study be counted as 'research risk,' or should we only count as 'research risk' those risks which a subject encounters solely because of research participation?"