When research harms those it seeks to help
▻http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Home/STOI/All-That-Matters/When-research-harms-those-it-seeks-to-help/articleshow/34947738.cms
This is exemplified in three randomized controlled trials evaluating cheap screening methods for cervical cancer, a disease that kills at least 70,000 women every year in India and four times that number the world over.
Over 350,000 women in villages in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra and in Mumbai slums were recruited for these trials which were funded by the Bill and Melinda #Gates Foundation and the US National Cancer Institute. The three trials started in 1998 and 2000 and the first results were presented in 2007, the most recent in 2013.
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The 136,000 women in the comparison or control arms of these trials were not given any screening. Instead, they were educated on the importance of screening and told where it could be obtained. The researchers describe this as ’standard care’ in India.
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Some researchers in these trials have stated that these studies looked at interventions relevant to poor Indians; the women in the control group were not deprived of anything since they would not have not have had access to screening. It was necessary to have a no screening control to evaluate the true impact of the screening techniques. And misconceived criticism of the trials’ ethics harms the cause of science. To this, one really has just two questions: Would these studies have been possible in the US? And would the researchers have recommended these trials to people they knew?
As much as it is the job of scientists to seek knowledge through research, they have an ethical responsibility to their research participants.
