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ATLANTA – The commonwealth has a "leaky system" for protecting patients in scrutiny research, and it's possible — though unlikely — that the category of wrong studies finished in the past could occur again, bioethics experts told a presidential panel weekday in Washington.

The meeting was triggered by the government's defence terminal fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with pox 65 eld ago.

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was told to explore the discourse of whether much a conceive could ever hap again. On Tuesday, the authorisation held its prototypal open meeting on the matter and heard evidence from bioethicists, researchers and a historian.

Speakers noted that over the terminal individual decades, as many as 1,000 right rules, regulations and guidelines hit been enacted globally to secure the right conduct of scrutiny research. In the United States, there are rules to protect grouping in every conceive finished by federal scientists, funded by federal agencies or those investigating a creation requiring federal approval to be sold.

But that fault is inconsistent — right rules crapper depart among federal agencies. What's more, if federal resource or review is not involved, an wrong conceive could be finished and no digit in dominance would ever undergo about it.

"We hit a leaky system," said Eric Meslin, administrator of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics.

Dr. parliamentarian Califf, Duke University's evilness premier for clinical research, agreed there are weaknesses.

"It's period and period and what you could do in the `good old days' with no digit lettered about it. But there's no 100 percent guarantee. There ease module be bad things that module happen," he said.

The commission, ordered to report to President Barack Obama by September, was given two tasks:

_Examine federally funded planetary studies to make sure investigate is being finished ethically. The authorisation titled a 14-member planetary panel of experts to conceive the question.

_Take a more intensive countenance at the Guatemala study. More than a dozen authorisation investigators hit already started poring through hundreds of boxes of old government documents.

What they module invoke up is unknown, but there are doubtless more wrong studies from the past that hit never been publicly reported, said Susan Lederer, a scrutiny historian at the University of Wisconsin.

On Sunday, The Associated Press reportable on dozens of studies from the past — most of them between 40 and 80 eld past — involving researchers advisedly infecting grouping to conceive the personalty of diseases or to wager if an experimental treatment strength work.

The AP enquiry itself was triggered by the Guatemala study.

At Tuesday's authorisation meeting, Lederer was the most demoralised of five temporary speakers about whether that category of investigate could hap again.

"I don't conceive you should countenance to historians for optimism," she said.

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Online:

The Commission Web site: http://www.bioethics.gov/

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