Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (Kapumba, Jambo, Rylance, Gmeiner, Gordon, Gooding); Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (Jambo, Rylance, Gmeiner, Gordon); Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and Ethox Centre, University of Oxford (Parker)
"...ongoing two-way dialogue is needed, as started through this consultation."
Often conducted as part of vaccine testing, human infection studies (HIS) raise challenging questions for ethical practice and community engagement in that they involve the deliberate infection of healthy adult volunteers with a microbial pathogen. In 2017, the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) organised a workshop to reflect on the implications of planned Streptococcus pneumoniae HIS work in Malawi (the Malawi Accelerated Research in Vaccines using Experimental and Laboratory Systems (MARVELS) project). Participants identified a need for community consultation to understand the acceptability and ethics of HIS in the Malawi context. This study responds to that recommendation. One aim is to support the wider development of ethical frameworks for HIS science in Malawi and other low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
BMC Medical Ethics (2020) 21:14 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-0454-y. Image credit: MLW