Ethical Considerations for Protecting Study Participants in Public Health and Safety

This article discusses the violation of ethical considerations for protecting study participants in public health and safety, using the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an example. Confidentiality, harm, and deception were not considered, leading to loss of lives. The article highlights the importance of ethical codes and rules in research studies.

Public health and safety
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Public health and safety
The deadly deception is a one hour documentary that narrates the ancient history on some
of challenges that the black Americans faced, to be in particular this write up entails a discussion
on the ethical considerations for protecting study participants were violated. It is important to
note that these principles had not been established during that time when the study was
conducted.
First and foremost, it important to note that the confidentiality and privacy of study participants
should be observed in any research study whatsoever. The persons conducting the study should
ensure that they first begin by asking the participants if they are willing or can be in a position to
talk about sensitive issues and topics without putting them in an awkward position. Well, this
was not the case for study participants that went through the study in search for the cure of
syphilis (bad blood). Their consent was not even asked for in the first place, they were just told it
was a test for the cure and they were exposed to any situations that they found uncomfortable
without their prior knowledge. This is a violation of the ethical considerations for any study
participants (Bate, 2012).
The issue of harm is another issue that should be greatly considered. Here, reasonable
steps should be taken to ensure that clients/participants are away from harm as much as possible
and if the researchers become aware of the possible harm that is likely to occur as a result of the
research to the participants then possible actions must be put in place to ensure that the harm is
minimized as much as possible. This was not the case for the research that was conducted late in
the 1920s, the study was racially motivated and conceived as a result of it lives were lost but the
experiments still continued.

Public health and safety
Deception is another ethical issue that was not considered during this study. The term
deception in this context can be used to mean the intentional misrepresentation of the nature,
facts or even nature and also consequences of the research. It also involves the intentional
omission of facts related to a particular study (Rampioni, Leoni Williams, 2014).Here we clearly
see that this ethical consideration were greatly violated in that the black men that volunteered as
study participants were not even told the true nature of the study. They were just told its main
purpose was to cure syphilis which was not the case. As a matter of fact, the sole purpose of this
particular research was to understand syphilis by studying it. Curing it was not among the
objectives of the research study.
Despite the fact that the relevant ethical codes not being present during that time,it is
evident that there was some violation of these very codes that exist in the present day. If by any
chance they would been present during that time a great violation of this codes could have been
seen (Bate, 2012).
The probability of such a case happening again is quite uncertain because now there are some
ethical codes and rules that guide any research study so as to ensure such issues do not happen
again.

Public health and safety
References
Bate, R. (2012). Phake: the deadly world of falsified and substandard medicines. AEI
Press.
Rampioni, G., Leoni, L., & Williams, P. (2014). The art of antibacterial warfare:
deception through interference with quorum sensing–mediated
communication. Bioorganic chemistry, 55, 60
-68.