Skip to main content

HIV Testing and Individual Rights

December 20, 2016
In their Policy Forum “HIV testing in China”, Z. Wu et al. describe the new Chinese national program of active, provider-initiated HIV/AIDS testing among prisoners and other high-risk groups. For some groups, such as prisoners and government workers, individuals consent to health examinations that include an HIV test, rather than...

AIDS Care and Treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa

December 20, 2016
With the advent of new AIDS treatment initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s “3 by 5” program and the United States’ “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” the ethical questions about AIDS care in the developing world have changed. No longer are they fundamentally about the conduct of research;...

Is It Ethical to Study What Ought Not to Happen?

December 20, 2016
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, only an estimated 2% of all AIDS patients have access to treatment. As AIDS treatment access is scaled-up in the coming years, difficult rationing decisions will have to be made concerning who will come to gain access to this scarce medical resource. This article...

Demographic and Health Surveillance

December 20, 2016
Longitudinal data gathered from health surveillance, when combined with detailed demographic information, can provide invaluable insight into disease outcomes. Many such surveillance sites exist in the developing world, particularly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and focus on diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. The indistinct positions of such...

Desperately Seeking Targets

December 20, 2016
The human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) pandemic, and responses to it, have exposed clear political, social and economic inequities between and within nations. The most striking manifestations of this inequity is access to AIDS treatment. In affluent nations, antiretroviral treatment is becoming the standard of care for those...

Is There a Place for Benevolent Deception?

December 20, 2016
In ‘Ethical jurisdictions in bioethical research’, J.M. Mfutso-Bengu and T. Taylor describe a conflict between a host ethics committee in Malawi and a remote ethical committee in USA, concerning the wording of a consent form. The study in question involved the removal of the eyes of children who had died...

Elegant Variations

December 20, 2016
Richard Rorty constructs a vision of the ideal citizen and the ideal society on the basis of three basic concepts: ethnocentrism, liberalism, and irony. This article critically examines his understanding of these three concepts and how he interrelates them. I will argue that Rorty’s political philosophy is lacking in internal...

Appropriateness of no-fault compensation for research related injuries from an African perspective: an appeal for action by African countries.

August 15, 2016

Dr. Stuart Rennie is now part of the Re-Engaging Ethics Team

August 2, 2016
Dr. Stuart Rennie, Associate Professor, UNC Social Medicine, is the ethics consultant for Re-engaging Ethics: Ethical Issues in Engaged Research. The project was awarded by the Greenwall Foundation, and aims to create guidelines to support ethical engagement in community engaged research. These guidelines are intended to aid academic and community...

searcHIV

July 29, 2016
Social and Ethical Aspects of Research on Curing HIV A Working Group Co-Principle Investigators: Stuart Rennie Joseph Tucker One of the defining qualities of living with HIV has been that it is incurable, and this tenet has powerfully formed and disrupted individual, organizational, and institutional identities. But recent medical advances...