US military medical ethics evolved during its involvement in two recent wars, Gulf War I and the War on Terror. Norms of conduct for military clinicians with regard to the treatment of prisoners of war and the administration of non-therapeutic bioactive agents to soldiers were set aside because of the sense of being in a ‘new kind of war’. Concurrently, the use of radioactive metal in weaponry and the ability to measure the health consequences of trade embargos on vulnerable civilians occasioned new concerns about the health effects of war on soldiers, their offspring, and civilians living on battlefields. Civilian medical societies and medical ethicists fitfully engaged the evolving nature of the medical ethics issues and policy changes during these wars. Medical codes of professionalism have not been substantively updated and procedures for accountability for new kinds of abuses of medical ethics are not established. Looking to the future, medicine and medical ethics have not articul
[Historically] the public has remained suspicious of much experimental research which, as a result, was often done on prisoners, orphans, the mentally challenged, and other captive populations without informed consent. But with the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, everything changed. Highly organised groups of gay men, confronted with a mysterious life-threatening disease, aggressively advocated for greater research funding and for early inclusion in experimental trials. Their arguments were persuasive enough for the US Food and Drug Administration to revise its protocols, expediting the drug approval process. [A number of moral concerns are raised by this shift in policy] and although groups such as Abigail's Alliance have urged US courts to find a constitutional right for terminally ill patients to get access to unapproved experimental therapies, recent rulings have gone in the other direction.
Tony, 47, and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 42, of Chandlers Quay, Maldon, who were Britain's first gay surrogate parents, denied one charge of providing false information to an ethics panel. The pair, who ran Euroderm Research, also deny two counts of not conforming to protocol when conducting a trial. The pair appeared before Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday. They also deny two charges of conducting a clinical trial otherwise than in accordance of good clinical practice.
These Regulations implement Directive 2001/20/EC on the approximation of laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use.
The vast sums of money ploughed into efforts to fight diseases such as Aids, TB and malaria in the last 10 years have saved many lives but have also sometimes undermined health systems in poor countries, according to a survey by the World Health Organisation and others published today. A worldwide outcry around the turn of the millennium over the plight of people in Africa dying of Aids, a disease kept in check with drugs in rich countries, triggered a rush to fund big disease-fighting programmes on the part of western governments, aid organisations and philanthropic donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But until now, there has been little attempt to find out how well the money has been spent and what impact the focus on high-profile diseases has had on the everyday business of hospitals, clinics and overworked healthcare staff in the poorer countries.
Leading GP bodies have given their support to new guidance on how patients’ medical records should be used in medical research. The guidance, published this week by the medical charity the Wellcome Trust, aims to make it clearer to GPs and researchers how they can ensure that medical records are used safely in research. The report says that patients’ records in general practice are a unique source of information that can help medical researchers improve their understanding of disease, develop potential new treatments, and improve care.