Journal article : Review
A scoping review of ethics review processes during public health emergencies in Africa
- Abstract:
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments, multilateral public health organisations and research institutions to undertake research quickly to inform their responses to the pandemic. Most COVID-19-related studies required swift approval, creating ethical and practical challenges for regulatory authorities and researchers. In this paper, we examine the landscape of ethics review processes in Africa during public health emergencies (PHEs).
Methods: We searched four electronic databases (Web of Science, PUBMED, MEDLINE Complete, and CINAHL) to identify articles describing ethics review processes during public health emergencies and/or pandemics. We selected and reviewed those articles that were focused on Africa. We charted the data from the retrieved articles including the authors and year of publication, title, country and disease(s) reference, broad areas of (ethical) consideration, paper type, and approach.
Results: Of an initial 4536 records retrieved, we screened the titles and abstracts of 1491 articles, and identified 72 articles for full review. Nine articles were selected for inclusion. Of these nine articles, five referenced West African countries including Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and experiences linked to the Ebola virus disease. Two articles focused on South Africa and Kenya, while the other two articles discussed more general experiences and pitfalls of ethics review during PHEs in Africa more broadly. We found no articles published on ethics review processes in Africa before the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and only a few before the COVID-19 outbreak. Although guidelines on protocol review and approval processes for PHEs were more frequently discussed after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, these did not focus on Africa specifically.
Conclusions: There is a gap in the literature about ethics review processes and preparedness within Africa during PHEs. This paper underscores the importance of these processes to inform practices that facilitate timely, context-relevant research that adequately recognises and reinforces human dignity within the quest to advance scientific knowledge about diseases. This is important to improve fast responses to PHEs, reduce mortality and morbidity, and enhance the quality of care before, during, and after pandemics.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.7MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12910-024-01054-8
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Medical Ethics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 63
- Publication date:
- 2024-05-22
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-05-06
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1472-6939
- Pmid:
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38778293
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
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Review
- Pubs id:
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1998277
- Local pid:
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pubs:1998277
- Deposit date:
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2024-06-12
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Orievulu et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2024, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Notes:
- The KEMRI-Wellcome Trust research was funded in whole or part by the Wellcome Trust core grant (203077/Z/16/Z). For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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