Article Text
Abstract
Bioethicists have long debated the content of sponsors and researchers' obligations of justice in international clinical research. However, there has been little empirical investigation as to whether and how obligations of responsiveness, ancillary care, post-trial benefits and research capacity strengthening are upheld in low- and middle-income country settings. In this paper, the authors argue that research ethics guidelines need to be more informed by international research practice. Practical guidance on how to fulfil these obligations is needed if research groups and other actors are to successfully translate them into practice because doing so is often a complicated, context-specific process. Case study research methods offer one avenue for collecting data to develop this guidance. The authors describe how such methods have been used in relation to the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit's vivax malaria treatment (VHX) trial (NCT01074905). Relying on the VHX trial example, the paper shows how information can be gathered from not only international clinical researchers but also trial participants, community advisory board members and research funder representatives in order to: (1) measure evidence of responsiveness, provision of ancillary care, access to post-trial benefits and research capacity strengthening in international clinical research; and (2) identify the contextual factors and roles and responsibilities that were instrumental in the fulfilment of these ethical obligations. Such empirical work is necessary to inform the articulation of obligations of justice in international research and to develop guidance on how to fulfil them in order to facilitate better adherence to guidelines' requirements.
- Research on special populations
- distributive justice
- research ethics
- philosophical ethics
- public health ethics
- HIV infection and AIDS
- informed consent
- behaviour modification
- biostatistics
- clinical ethics
- competence/incompetence
- ethics committees/consultation
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
-
Linked article YES.
-
Competing interests None.
-
Ethics approval Mahidol University Faculty of Tropical Medicine Ethics Committee; Oxford Tropical Research Ethics Committee (Oxtrec); Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee.
-
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
-
Open Access This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Linked Articles
Other content recommended for you
- A comparison of justice frameworks for international research
- Research for Health Justice: an ethical framework linking global health research to health equity
- Voluntariness of consent in paediatric HIV clinical trials: a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of participants in the CHAPAS-4 and ODYSSEY trials in Uganda
- A capacity-based approach for addressing ancillary care needs: implications for research in resource limited settings
- Clinical, geographical, and temporal risk factors associated with presentation and outcome of vivax malaria imported into the United Kingdom over 27 years: observational study
- Rapid diagnostic tests to improve treatment of malaria and other febrile illnesses: patient randomised effectiveness trial in primary care clinics in Afghanistan
- Individual risk and community benefit in international research
- Modelling the impact of rapid diagnostic tests on Plasmodium vivax malaria in South Korea: a cost–benefit analysis
- Overdiagnosis and mistreatment of malaria among febrile patients at primary healthcare level in Afghanistan: observational study
- Investigation and treatment of imported malaria in non-endemic countries