African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
GuineaLiberiaSierra LeoneSociety
Home›African Arguments›Country›West›Guinea›Insiders Insight: Stealing blood from West Africa

Insiders Insight: Stealing blood from West Africa

By Africa Insiders
February 12, 2019
2772
0
Credit: EC/ECHO.
Credit: EC/ECHO.

Credit: EC/ECHO.

African Arguments is and always will be freely-accessible to everyone.

But we also have a separate spin-off product called the Insiders Newsletter. It consists of weekly emails with additional snappy insights on topics such as elections, conflict, health and more. It’s for those who want a bit extra and comes with a small subscription fee: $10/month ($15 if you want to be a generous “supporter”) or $100/year ($150 for supporters).

The income from the Insiders Newsletter goes towards keeping African Arguments, and all its free content, going.

Each week, we publish the table of contents and a free segment from the Insiders Newsletter on African Arguments:

Click here to SUBSCRIBE.


Table of contents:

  • What everyone is talking about
    • Teff is coming home
  • What we are talking about
    • Tunisia’s ruling party ruptures
  • Conflict Focus
    • The Boko Haram Insurgency
  • Health Corner
    • Stolen blood
  • Hear this word
    • Sierra Leone’s sexual assault crisis
  • What else?

Free segment: Continental health corner

Stolen blood

The export of thousands of samples of blood from the 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak has raised significant ethical questions about who benefits from medical research.

In this case, the patients whose blood was collected and shipped to research facilities around the world were not consulted and their consent was never sought. It appears, according to a new piece in The Telegraph by investigative journalist and African Arguments contributor Emmanuel Freudenthal, that the governments of the countries that were fighting Ebola – Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea – were also largely kept in the dark.

Instead, researchers from countries including the US, UK, Germany and others, exported the samples abroad in a bid to conduct research into vaccines and treatments for the virus. While there are certainly scientific benefits if cures are discovered using these samples, there are likely also monetary gains – and now questions about who should share in them.

Some of the countries have written to the laboratories to reassert their ownership of the samples – and any research that they generate. But The Telegraph reports that some of the labs are unresponsive and overall engagement on the issue is limited.

Why this matters

This situation raises obvious questions about the ethics of extracting blood samples and then using them for research without even attempting to seek permission from the patients themselves, or their government representatives, at the very least. And while some ethicists argued that the public good that could emerge from a vaccine or cure outweighed researcher responsibilities to any of the patients, it reinforces a perception that patients – and particularly patients in the developed world – don’t have any rights.

Many of the patients Freudenthal spoke to agreed they would have allowed researchers to use the samples had anyone bothered to ask. And researchers in the African countries also underscored the question of why none of the laboratories bothered, at the very least, to integrate them into the research being conducted on the back of the suffering in their country.

  • Ebola’s lost blood: Row over samples flown out of Africa (The Telegraph)

Discuss with @_andrew_green on Twitter

Click here to SUBSCRIBE.

Previous Article

Nigeria’s win-or-die elections and what can be ...

Next Article

Tanzania search for missing millions raises questions ...

mm

Africa Insiders

The Africa Insiders Newsletter is a weekly newsletter brought to you by African Arguments. Written by leading journalists and analysts, it it made up of snappy, insightful updates on the major developments that have hit the week's headlines, and those that should've.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • People celebrating Somaliland's Independence Day on the streets of the capital Hargeysa in 2016. Credit: Clay Gilliland.
    PoliticsSomaliland

    Somaliland at 30: Still unrecognised, but alive and well

  • AU forces AMISOM and the Somali National Army on a joint operation. Credit: AU-UN IST PHOTO / STUART PRICE.
    PoliticsSocietySomalia

    Why Somalia’s grand strategies aren’t working

  • Politics

    Peace in Darfur: Prioritizing or Police Enforcement?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Of cobblers, colonialism, and choices
  • Blackness, Pan-African Consciousness and Women’s Political Organising through the Magazine AWA
  • “People want to be rich overnight”: Nigeria logging abounds despite ban
  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners
  • Africa Elections 2023: All the upcoming votes

Editor’s Picks

CountryCovid-19Editor's Picks

Covid-19 vaccine rollout in Africa tracker: An interactive map

Tracking the progress of the vaccine rollout across the continent.   There has been a lot of focus on COVID-19 vaccine inequalities between high-income and low- and middle-income countries. For ...
  • People in Juba, South Sudan, greet the arrival of a delegation from the UN Security Council in September 2016. Credit: UNMISS.

    South Sudan needs elections. Here’s a clear plan for how they can happen.

    By Peter Biar Ajak
    February 23, 2022
  • Refugees from Ukraine at the Polish border on 27 February 2022. Credit: Alexander Somto (Nze) Orah.

    “Only Ukrainians, not Blacks”: Fleeing African students face racism

    By Ope Adetayo
    March 3, 2022
  • Girls line up during a basketball drill in Mogadishu, Somalia. Credit: AU UN IST/Tobin Jones.

    To counter al-Shabaab, Somalia’s new govt must do something for the kids

    By Liban Obsiye & Liban A. Hussein
    May 24, 2022
  • A forgotten community: The little town in Niger keeping the lights on in France

    By Lucas Destrijcker & Mahadi Diouara
    July 18, 2017

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu