Research and Informed Consent in Africa — Another Look

The current practice of requiring the informed consent of research is relatively new. . . . The fundamental justification for requiring from human subjects as a matter of U. S. public policy is best stated the Belmont Report of 1978, which bases the obligation to obtain consent on ethical principle of respect for persons. . . . This strong emphasis on for autonomy is, however, neither unchallenged in the United States nor necessarily accepted elsewhere in the world, including Western and Africa. The challenge centers on the validity of applying ethical for research that are accepted in one part of the world to a cultural setting. It is in this context that the appropriateness of-person informed consent (i. e. , informed consent given by the subjects), as practiced in the West, is being questioned. . . . The most argument against modifying the obligation of researchers to obtain consent from individual subjects is that such an obligation expresses and basic moral values that are universally applicable, regardless variations in cultural practice. Although we are sympathetic to this, our arguments in this paper do not turn on claims about universal or criticism of cultural relativism. Instead, our aim is to argue the of arguments that appeal to cultural relativism on factual, rather than the unjustifiability of such arguments on moral grounds. speaking, the appropriateness of first-person informed consent in countries has been questioned on three grounds: that it is or anthropologically inappropriate; that potential subjects have competence to give informed consent or that there are communication problems; and that the need for immediate findings makes informed-consent requirements unreasonable. We shall these arguments in turn. . . .