HOME
Category: Research Articles
October 01, 2001
At the turn of the twentieth century, health care in the United States, as in the rest of the world, was a commodity: you could buy it and enjoy it if you could pay for it. The poor went hungry or received some care at municipal, governmental or charity soup kitchens. In the 1920s, liberal reform...
July 01, 2001
Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has changed the profile of the HIV epidemic in the developed world. Many of these countries have reported a dramatic decline in AIDS-related morbidity and mortality after the introduction of HAART into routine clinical practice. For the first time sinc...
July 01, 2001
Can research ethics be guided? How can ethical research practices be stimulated? Questions like these are discussed by the Mini-Committee on Ethics and Politics, a multidisciplinary group of researchers in La Paz, Bolivia. Our activities grew out of the ten-year experience of the Committee for Re...
July 01, 2001
When we scan the history of human civilisations it becomes evident that the evolution of ethical concepts has preoccupied philosophers, ethicists, sociologists, theologians, professionals and indeed all of society. We then have to assume that evolving ethical concepts is deemed as a necessity for...
April 01, 2001
"In Great Britain, as in many other parts of the world, all medical research involving humans is subject to scrutiny by a local research ethics committee (LREC). Local research ethics committees provide independent advice to all bodies belonging to the National Health Service (NHS) within the geo...
April 01, 2001
The aim of this first review of the Research Ethics Committee at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, is to provide insight into its structure, composition, procedures and workload, and to assess its strengths and weaknesses.
October 01, 2000
In recent years, there is increasing pressure on academia to develop links with industry and to pursue work of possible commercial value. This pressure results in situations with ethical problems, such as recruitment practices in clinical trials, impact on publication of clinical trial data and a...
October 01, 2000
On September 14, 1990, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health performed the first approved gene therapy procedure on four-year old Ashanti DeSilva, born with severe combined immune deficiency. Doctors removed her white blood cells, let the cells grow in the lab, inserted the missin...
July 01, 2000
Medical ethics is a path illuminated by principles to guide members of the medical profession in their dealings with each other and with their patients. Here, I concern myself with the doctor-doctor relationship, which is under severe stress. I refer to negative professional criticism of one's co...
July 01, 2000
The development of a new drug is a lengthy process. Once a promising compound is identified, it must be investigated in laboratory studies and tested on laboratory animals. After years of work, the newly developed drug is ready for clinical trials, or the testing on human volunteers.