STATUTORY SAFEGUARDS FOR HEALTH RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS IN NIGERIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

For a long time in history, the tales of health research involving humans have been like that of vile assailants and their pitiable victims. These victims (participants) were not only misinformed but were also exposed to unethical practices highly inimical to their physical, psychological, social and emotional well-being. While experiments like the Tuskegee syphilis study and the Nigerian Trovan study recorded a good number of deaths, experiments like the Stanford Experiment, Albert Kigman and Herbert Copelan Experiment caused severe impairments on the credulous participants. To ensure that these unethical practices were only found in history archives, international and domestic communities established certain legal frameworks, international standards and best practices to ensure that human participants were properly protected. These frameworks equally made provisions for regulatory institutions to ensure that these established frameworks are complied with. However, the pertinent question remains, has the creation of these legal frameworks totally eradicated unethical conducts in health research involving human participants in developing countries? Has Nigeria’s approach on the subject matter been effective? Or has it been a case of docile institutions and failure to comply with the available legal frameworks? To provide plausible answers to these disconcerting questions, the paper will undertake a comparative analysis of some selected legal frameworks in Nigeria and in USA and the said comparison will revolve around the process of obtaining informed consent from the research participants, vulnerable population, selection/ recruitment process of research participants and the ethical review process as it relates to the protection of these human research participants. While at it, the paper found that despite minute disparities, there were huge similarities between the two jurisdictions (Nigeria and USA). Consequent upon these findings, the study also made some recommendations. This paper, while adopting the doctrinal methodology of research, employed the analytical and comparative research approaches.