Ethics and morals guide and dictate the type of biological, medical and social experiments that can be performed. Medical anthropology explicitly confronts ethical questions and relies on the protocols developed by international and national agencies, wherein the rules of conduct and underlying values that guide healing activities in a given society are evaluated and applied to avoid causing harm. Although experiments must undergo a rigorous ethical review process before they are allowed to start, some studies have been overlooked without a critical gaze and have created notorious controversies. David Brewster uses his background and experiences to evaluate the controversial zidovudine (AZT) trials in Africa in the late 1990s through his review
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The AZT trials sparked exploitative/ethical concerns for HIV/AIDS infected African subjects wherein the wealthy sponsoring country gave the control group a placebo rather than an already known to be effective drug to prevent the vertical transmission of the HIV/AIDS virus. The CMA perspective is applied through Brewster’s critiquing of powerful organizations and power imbalances between countries in the Global North and Global South. Wherein Brewster argues that the over regulations created by bureaucratic agencies have discouraged African HIV/AIDS research and that there is a strong need for African academic institutions to improve their research capacity through collaboration with donors. The CMA perspective allows Brewster to emphasize the exercising of power wealthy western nations enact upon African nation through political and economic means of control (through overtly neglectful market forces) which has significantly influenced the experiences of HIV/AIDS infected individuals within the Southern regions of Africa. Therefore, Brewster analysis relies heavily upon the political and economic interactions of macro-social structures between economically unequal nations to reveal overt health disparities. The use of the CMA perspective introduces many strengths and weaknesses to Brewster’s analysis of the AZT …show more content…
The lack of proper characterization of the relationships between western and African nations was alarming due to the fact that it underemphasizes why western nations are critical of lending aid to African countries. Brewster boils down the complex relationship between post-colonizer and the post-colonized to a single sentence stating “Lurie and Wolfe expressed concern about the potential exploitation of residents of impoverished, post-colonial countries and the hundreds of infants who have needlessly contracted HIV infection in the perinatal-transmission studies” (648). Not only does this sentence not reflect historic relationships it makes double standards of ethics and care to be logical to ignore. Brewster’s ahistorical presentation of Western-African relations makes the rest of his analysis biased and ultimately fails to address the roots of why western aid is so regulated. The combination of these two factors may have biased Brewster’s conclusions; however, the information gained from the ATZ trials outweighs Brewster
The AZT trials sparked exploitative/ethical concerns for HIV/AIDS infected African subjects wherein the wealthy sponsoring country gave the control group a placebo rather than an already known to be effective drug to prevent the vertical transmission of the HIV/AIDS virus. The CMA perspective is applied through Brewster’s critiquing of powerful organizations and power imbalances between countries in the Global North and Global South. Wherein Brewster argues that the over regulations created by bureaucratic agencies have discouraged African HIV/AIDS research and that there is a strong need for African academic institutions to improve their research capacity through collaboration with donors. The CMA perspective allows Brewster to emphasize the exercising of power wealthy western nations enact upon African nation through political and economic means of control (through overtly neglectful market forces) which has significantly influenced the experiences of HIV/AIDS infected individuals within the Southern regions of Africa. Therefore, Brewster analysis relies heavily upon the political and economic interactions of macro-social structures between economically unequal nations to reveal overt health disparities. The use of the CMA perspective introduces many strengths and weaknesses to Brewster’s analysis of the AZT …show more content…
The lack of proper characterization of the relationships between western and African nations was alarming due to the fact that it underemphasizes why western nations are critical of lending aid to African countries. Brewster boils down the complex relationship between post-colonizer and the post-colonized to a single sentence stating “Lurie and Wolfe expressed concern about the potential exploitation of residents of impoverished, post-colonial countries and the hundreds of infants who have needlessly contracted HIV infection in the perinatal-transmission studies” (648). Not only does this sentence not reflect historic relationships it makes double standards of ethics and care to be logical to ignore. Brewster’s ahistorical presentation of Western-African relations makes the rest of his analysis biased and ultimately fails to address the roots of why western aid is so regulated. The combination of these two factors may have biased Brewster’s conclusions; however, the information gained from the ATZ trials outweighs Brewster