Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The New Vision (Uganda) - April 12, 2001
Critics argue that the researchers let some of the villagers contract HIV and did not treat those who had the virus.
But the researchers from John Hopkins and Makerere universities said they did not do anything unethical and their study was approved by five ethics review boards including one in Uganda.
The senior programme officer in the Uganda AIDS Commission, Prof. John Rwomushana, Monday said they were aware of the controversy, which he blamed on misinformation. He said they were preparing to invite researchers, ethicists, policy makers, and planners to discuss the issue. "It is a valid issue for debate.
We have an open policy led by the Government and as (global) leaders in the fight against AIDS, we are interested in consultation and public debate," he said in an interview with The New Vision.
The researchers studied 415 married couples whose husbands or wives had HIV while the partners did not. They said most of the couples declined to use condoms given to them and during 30 months of observation, 90 people in the study caught the virus.
The findings gave a clue as to why some people do not infect their sexual partners. The researchers' conclusion was that some people do not pass on the virus to their partners because they have low amounts of the virus in their blood.
Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine published the findings, said the researchers should have taken responsibility for their Ugandan study subjects as they would have done in the US.
"Our ethical standards should not depend on where the research is performed," she wrote in an editorial.
Angell said the manner in which the study was conducted "meant that for up to 30 months, several hundred people with HIV infection were observed but not treated." In addition, she said, it was left up to the infected member of each couple to decide whether or not to inform the uninfected partner of the disease.
A professor of immunology at the US Hereford Medical School, Dr. Jerome Groopman, wondered how American researchers could "stand by silently while their (Ugandan) subjects contracted the HIV virus."
However, the lead author of the study and a professor at the John Hopkins University, Dr. Thomas Quinn, said, "We gave them a better standard of care than is available to poor people in the United States."
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