Lowering Testing Standards in Third World Countries Essay

“Drug Safety: An Argument to Ban Animal Testing.” Journal of Nursing Law, vol. 12, no. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 147-156.

As of 2015, 200 to 225 million animals are said to used in laboratory research for the biomedical industry annually worldwide. Typically defended by arguments of reliability and human health benefits, recently the question of ethics and values placed on animal testing have caused it to become a relevant and pressing topic that has been more widely discussed and debated. First off, the laboratory conditions that are instigated upon millions of animal models for the sake of medical research has been said to be unethical and cruel. Additionally, it has been debated that the results of animal experimentation are unreliable across a wide range of areas. Lastly, animal testing not only leads away from the direction of resources from more effective testing methods but also prolongs the duration of time humans may need to wait for an effective cure. Therefore, the potential benefits of animal experimentation are greatly outweighed by the risks and collective harm of humans and animals which is why resources should be directed towards more human-based testing procedures.

The main purpose was to determine if the patients would have better outcomes. The study concluded

Misconception with equipoise will make the barrier between therapeutic and research null. Its goal in producing reliable and generalizable knowledge is coiled in with ethical difficulty. That’s why on an ethical standpoint, benefiting a collective group needs to be weighed with the rights of the participant patients in the clinical research. However, the goal of equipoise is beneficial since its main priority is extracting epistemic information from the randomized clinical trials. The useful information is needed since equipoise follows the principle of having “a state of genuine uncertainty.” This affects both theoretical and clinical. So, trials that are redundant can be marked out by taking equipoise into account since the trials have already been run where there is already certainty of the outcome. So, to detail what equipoise allows underneath the principle of “non-exploitation” is that there will be no exploitation of participants or patients with a needless trial that holds no useful outcome. Equipoise becomes a necessary condition in order for a trial to become ethical since trials must be reviewed to be deemed of value. But, there’s an underlying factor that equipoise’s uncertainty trials do not bring about and that is the health of the patients. Participant patients will undergo trials of uncertainty so there is a possibility that the patient may be harmed during the process. If the trial proceeds, then the health of the patients will be even more at risk, disregarded and exploited in order to grasp epistemic information. The moral principles between medical therapy and those that guide clinical research is different. Though, equipoise is valuable in a collective sense – it is exploitative of participant patients by failing to consider the balance with the subject and societal

There are an immense amount of problems in Africa caused by the AIDS disease. Healthcare providers are available and located all over Africa. Even though they are available, they have only “enough medicine for long-term survival available for 30,000 Africans” (Copson, 3).

In The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein talks about why HIV/AIDS rate is so high in Africa compared to the rest of the world. Through the book, she gives us an account of the disease and the struggles that many health experts and ordinary Africans went through to understand this disease, and how different African countries approached the same problem differently. Through this paper, I will first address the different ways Uganda and Southern African countries, South Africa and Botswana in particular, dealt with this epidemic, and then explain how we can use what we have learned from these African countries to control outbreaks of communicable disease elsewhere around the world.

The first article is entitled “of mice but not men: problems of randomized clinical trials,” is written by Samuel Hellman and Deborah S. Hellman discusses the issues of randomized medical testing and experiments on patients. The article describes the role of the personal physician and how the physician can take an ethical or unethical path of treating his/her patients. The relationship between the patient and physician is greatly emphasized because according to the article trust is very valuable in medicine especially when a patient’s life is at risk. A Kantian and a Utilitarian view of randomized clinical trials are debated but the authors clearly steers towards a Kantian point of view.

HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, commonly known as AIDS. HIV/AIDS has become one of the most destructive global pandemics in history. In 1990, the World Health Organization estimated that over one million people were living with AIDS, and in less than ten years, HIV had exploded worldwide (Perlin & Cohen). Johanna Tayloe Crane, a medical anthropologist, dedicated her career to studying the way political and economic inequalities influence how HIV/AIDS is researched and treated for in Africa. Crane complied over ten years of ethnographic research to study a HIV research partnership between a US university and Ugandan universities and clinics. Her book, Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science, unpacks both the American and Ugandan researcher’s and clinicians’ perspectives about the research partnership and critiques the U.S. response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Her findings reveal the paradox of health institutions and their global health research partnerships benefit from the inequalities they are trying to readdress. These global, economic, and scientific inequalities have allowed Global Health Science research partnerships to establish their own authority over Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Benefit of the treatment is Difference in the outcome for diseased patients who receive treatment compared to those who don’t take treatment.

Essentially, FDA rules for approving drugs are based on the randomized, double-blinded placebo control group design (Wampold and Bhati, 2004). Drugs are typically approved by the FDA if they can be shown in a number of trials to be much better than a placebo, and placebos are designed to be indistinguishable from the active medication. Wampold and Bhati (2004) point out that the reasoning behind this approach is that the specific ingredients of the active medication should be shown to be responsible for benefits over and above psychological effects such as hope and expectation. Although the origins of this design go back to the 1950s, it was not until 1980 that such designs were required by the FDA for drug approval (Shapiro & Shapiro, 1997).

Placebo refers to any medical treatment that is inert. The placebo has long been used in investigation trials to accurately test the effectiveness of a new health care treatment, such as a medicine or drug. A placebo is essential to the behaviour of many systematically-based proven trials. Sugar pill is one of the example of the placebo. In order to test the placebo effect, some scientist will use two groups, the first group will take the drugs and the second group will take the placebo. None of the members of the two groups know whether they are taking active or inactive substance. Sometimes, not even the researches know or this is what they called the double blind test. The effects of the drug and placebo from both groups will be compared

The primary audience in this article is men and women in the medical industry. This topic of alternative medicine and how trials are done can be associated with the medical industry. Ernst (2009) also uses language that is associated with the medical industry such as clinically, therapeutic, trial, placebo and biologically implausibility.

The African countries south of the Sahara have some of the best HIV surveillance systems in the world. They provide solid evidence that the HIV infection rate has stabilized at a relatively low level in Senegal and that the extremely high rates in Uganda have been reduced. However, in most sub-Saharan countries adults and children are acquiring HIV at a higher rate than ever before: the number of new infections in the

During the last three decades, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus have taken the lives of many women and men in Africa, as well as infecting their unborn children. Is there enough being done to eradicate this disease in Africa, and will the cost of these treatments limit those who do not have the available income to afford these drugs? Scientist and researchers have worked over the years to find a cure or vaccine for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but it remains the most incurable infection in the world. “There are several promising drug therapies now becoming available which are far too expensive for poor countries to afford” (Economist, Vol. 344,

Throughout his article, McKie uses a great variety of phrases and techniques to strikingly portray the reality of animal testing and the lesser-known activities which happen behind the scenes. He powerfully communicates both the negative and positive features of using animals in experiments without definitively taking a side, thus he lets us form our own opinions on the morality of animal testing. Personally, I am a proponent of the use of animals in medical experiments solely because I am convinced that they are the most reliable and accurate was to gauge the effectiveness of