The article from the Lebanese Newspaper, Al Hayat, (Friday 24, 2009, issue no. 16821) refers to numerous experiments done on humans in prison camps. These experiments are being carried out in occupied Palestine, Iraq and other countries without patient consent. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and the infamous Tuskegee Experiments (among others) led to a serious reexamination of ethical standards in research and to the agreement that potential human subjects needed to be protected from being exploited as 'guinea pigs' in scientific research.
The stories revealed in the article are a clear violation of many treaties and codes of research ethics. Yet, they continue to take place and nothing is being done to stop them.
As Dante once said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”.
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Prisoners are a vulnerable population and hence are subject to exploitation and abuse.
ReplyDeleteThe WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION DECLARATION OF HELSINKI: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects can be found on the following URL: http://www.wma.net/e/policy/pdf/17c.pdf
The Declaration has been recently updated (2008).
I read the article and I could not belive what I read! The problem is firstly that codes are there (as now we know since frankly I did not know about them) and yet they are still broken. It is not only not respecting of human rights, it is not respecting of the institutions and organizations that put the codes.
ReplyDeleteSo I have two questions: what is the use of the codes since they can be broken? And when they are broken, is there nothing important organization can do (like the WMA since you posted a link to it)?
I too was surprised when I read the article. I wonder whether the Medical Associations of the Countries and the Research can take actions.
ReplyDeleteWe studied about the fact that any research must go through committees for approval (Research Reviews). Did this happen? If yes, the crime is worse. The Committees should be sued and the hospitals closed. It is like the time of the Nazis. Not everythings must be ok in science or in medicine. We take ethics courses, we learn to be doctors and humane. We are not criminals.