A new, multidisciplinary paper by CARe-researchers Christian Munthe, Niels Nijsingh, Karl de Fine Licht and Joakim Larsson addresses the impact of new, more widely applicable and more demanding research ethical guidelines for research to evaluate interventions to manage antibiotic resistance.
The new guidelines, issued by the international organization of medical sciences, CIOMS, have recently expanded to apply to all ”health-related research” and prescribes reviews to consider the wider ”social value” of the research. The paper "Health-related Research Ethics and Social Value: Antibiotic Resistance Intervention Research and Pragmatic Risks” discusses the impact of these changes for antibiotic resistance interventions. The authors argue both that the new guidelines strongly support research to ascertain the social value of such interventions, and that research ethical review of such interventions need to consider particularly complicated ”pragmatic risks”. Such risks arise due to the potential of many interventions to awake negative or inadequate responses from professionals, policy makers, business, or people in general. The authors argue that this important task requires institutional changes for how research to evaluate the social value of health interventions is ethically reviewed. It has been accepted by the leading ethics journal Bioethics, to be published in a coming special issue on the implications of the new CIOMS guidelines. A preprint of the manuscript for free reading and download is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.12580