Transmission of AIDS from Mother to Child - Essay Example

Dr. Marcia Angell’s views regarding medical research are very straight forwards and she speaks for millions of people who also believe that even though medical research is extremely important for the betterment of human beings and in making progress against the various forms of diseases, yet Dr. Angell holds that the objectives of the research cannot supersede the well being of the subjects of the research. No matter how important research might be, the lives of the participants must not be put at risk under any circumstances, whether they belong to the control group or vice versa. Dr, Angell supports her point of view by quoting the Declaration of the Helsinki of the World Health Organization which clearly states that methods used to treat the research subjects must be medically and therapeutically the best (Angell, 847).

Dr. Angell’s concerns regarding the ethical legitimacy of the research conducted on third world subjects to get a clearer picture regarding the vertical transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from a pregnant mother to her unborn child. Dr. Angell characterizes this research as unethical due to the presence of placebo-treated control groups. Dr. Angell validates her argument by pointing out that it was not like the researchers were clueless about any sort of preventative treatment for the disease. Zidovudine has been recommended by doctors in the USA to all pregnant women infected with HIV so as to reduce/ eliminate the rate of vertical transmission of the virus to the unborn child. Consequently, Dr. Angell believes that merely getting the informed consent forms signed is not enough to term research as ethical, rather it is criminal to deny a group of patients the proper treatment just so that the objectives of the research are met.

As a justification, the researchers stated that the subjects of the research belonged to poor third world families and in any case would not have had access to the specified treatment, therefore they (the researchers) were only observing what would naturally have happened to these patients. In another research that tested the effectiveness of prophylaxis against tuberculosis in HIV-infected patients, placebo-treated control groups existed. However, that research could have been justified on the basis that the medical effectiveness of prophylaxis was yet unknown, but this was not the case with Zidovudine (Angell 847-848).
The critics of Dr. Angell’s approach stated that the cost of administering Zidovudine to the subjects of the study in Africa was too high and that a lot of expertise is required to administer Zidovudine to patients which are just not available in a third world country like Africa.

Moreover, the critics state that the researches are just an effort to be able to develop cheap, effective and more affordable medicines available to people of third-world countries. Critics argue that the purpose of this research was not to come up with a medicine for the first world countries rather the purpose was to come up with a solution to the problem of HIV AIDS prevalent in Africa, therefore the motives of the researchers were not selfish. Moreover, the critics argue that the subjects who were given the placebo would normally not have undergone any treatment simply because they would not have been able to afford it. Therefore, the researchers only tried to work in the best interest of the Africans so that in the future their generations were able to have access to a cure for the vertical transmission of HIV AIDS (Niekerk 156 - 160).

Immanuel Kant believed that human beings must not be used as a rather they must be used as a means to an end. In conducting this research, the purpose of the researchers was not to treat the subjects as ends rather with the informed consent of the participants, the researchers wanted to use them as a means to an end by developing an affordable solution to a disease so common in Africa. Adding to this is the fact that Kant emphasized the fact that anything done with deception as its foundation is wrong, which was not the case over here. Read More